Hacker News Reader

Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

This mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.

Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.

View on HN

There's a bit of history to destroying books. So yes, anathema.

Yes, destroying books is a crime. Anyone who destroys a book is a criminal.

I have thrown out an old, mass produced paperback book that nobody wanted to buy out from me in 2 years it's been on my country website that's the most popular.

I guess I am criminal.

So true. This is why I boycott libraries and the publishing industry in general. Atrocious what they do to copies that don't get enough circulation/distribution! There aren't enough pitchforks in the world that can express this outrage!

Ok, but that's not what's happening. They are destroying the copies and not making them available to be shared. They are using them to increase the value of their business.

Except we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world.

Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.

Most people do not support the destruction of books - it seems like the issue in both cases is copyright forcing the destruction and non-release of the scan.

They don't have to destroy the books to scan them. There are techniques for doing it non-destructively, but they're slower and more expensive. It's cheaper to cut the spines off and drop the stack of papers on a flatbed scanner with a paper feeder.

Destroying the original makes it easier to justify that scanning the books is fair use, because you haven't increased the number of copies. See page 16 of https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar... : "This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one)"

That is just a policy problem. A reactive legislature could fix this in a week, rewriting the law.

For example, require the digitized copies to be put in a public trust where for example libraries can provide these books as digital loans. (Per author adjustment for copyright, if it’s not possible now, store them nonpublically in the trust until later.)

A world where the US Congress can get anything done in a week, much less something that will anger the media cartels that fund their elections and can decide who gets coverage and what kind is not anything like the one we live in.

They won’t share it.

And I bet it’s more likely that in 100 years you can read a book printed nowadays than you can read data digitized nowadays.

This is very strong argument and it holds as soon as 2026 - much of 90s data, a lot of it online, is of course already lost.

If the book really is difficult to come by I don't know that I'd prefer it to only survive as a statistical approximation that can be mostly retrieved if you utter the correct incantation. The AI trainers don't care about the book. It's just a commodified stream of words.

Let's talk again when it turned out operating LLMs at that scale isn't profitable, the companies go bankrupt, and you need to learn about said niche subjects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com