Not even the title of one of those rare books?
It would seem the redaction of the rare titles is a way to avoid de-anonymization and subsequent harm to the business of the seller who agreed to place a tracker in one of the books. That being said, maybe they could have chosen a better methodology which would have allowed the disclosure of the title, although ultimately I’m not sure the title matters too much outside of their claim they were “rare”.
My neighbor self-published a book, printed I think 100 copies at his own expense. It's literally a rare book. I can't imagine he nor anyone would care if an AI company bought a copy, no matter what they did with it.
Maybe these "rare books" are first edition Mark Twains, and. maybe they're unwanted books that would otherwise have gone to be pulped. The distinction is important and by not giving any evidence or even a qualitative claim about the types of books, 404 media is being pretty weak here.
And beyond just benefit to society, don't forget how subjective the decision about what constitutes a "unique artifact" is. That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother. Not necessarily the ink printed on paper, but the information contained within.
The above is based on a true story involving archive.org's Manual Library. The idea that even such esoteric and forgotten information would get hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI and then destroyed in the outside world, such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it, is frankly disgusting.
On the other hand, now that the manual is in the AI, you can just ask the AI how to repair the sewing machine.
The information contained within has not been lost, and in fact has become much more accessible.
Like so often in its usage, the word "just" is carrying immense weight in this sentence. Please see "hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI [...] such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it"
> has become much more accessible
This accessibility rests on a number of assumptions, not the least of which is Amazon's (of all companies) charitable good graces in offering access to their AI at an affordable price. It also assumes that the model can accurately regurgitate the text without hallucinating about other, similar machines, and that it can faithfully recreate any diagrams.
That ain’t a rare book.
I would also be shocked if you couldn’t find a way to repair and use this 1966 sewing machine… so it seems like a red herring.
Thanks for your opinion. I see you disagree with my first point.
> I would also be shocked if you couldn’t find a way to repair and use this 1966 sewing machine… so it seems like a red herring.
"Repair of the sewing machine is obviously simple and thus left as an exercise to the reader."
Seriously, though, I'm trying to say that you can't make that call for me. You can think that, but I know from experience repairing old machines (with more or less sentimental value) that having the original manual can be the difference between fixing it and irreparably damaging it. I could also, in turn, suppose that you probably do not actually collect and preserve rare "unique artifact" books, and therefore your argument about them is a red herring. But then we would both just be casting aspersions.
The rare qualifier is used precisely because no reasonable person thinks this is stealing.
Nothing good comes from hoarding whether it being toilet paper, money or knowledge.
No reasonable person thinks buying 1 of something is "hoarding".
It is still stealing even if the book is common.
However, a title can be cross-referenced against purchase histories in probably under a minute.
(small historical irony: when Amazon first started selling books, they used the Books in Print database, which included a lot of books not actually in print.)