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Comment by CamelCaseName | Hacker News Reader

You ask "Why destroy physical books?"

I ask "Why save physical books?"

If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless.

I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.

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>If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable,

Sometimes I don't even know how to respond to comments here. I don't want to be rude, but you just have to give this a moment of thought. Is all the media that you find valuable common? I know that's not the case for me based on my own experience.

So these books are not worth anything because they have so few copies but they are still worth including in only their models? Seems a bit contradictory

Not really. A trivial example: smut novels. I'm sure AI companies want them for training so their models work better as AI girlfriends/boyfriends, but I doubt much would be lost if the bottom 50% (by readership) of such books went into a woodchipper.

You're confusing the worth of the book and its content. A book can be valuable (ie a rare bible print), whereas its content is not (we have all the bible variants copied).

Good point, why waste time deciphering old badly burnt scrolls when anything worthwhile should have been preserved.

If the Romans had the printing press we'd have a lot more of those scrolls.

That's what state libraries are for, although I understand that sometimes is hard to wrap around the concept of using public money for something different than producing money.

Libraries tend to regularly destroy books as well. And they aren't scanning them first either.

Doesn't that make them even worse?

"State libraries" such as the Library of Congress. (Which is not regularly destroying books, AFAIK.)

What you personally find important is not what everyone else finds important or inspiring. Destroying something takes it away from every single future human being.

> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable

"likely" being the keyword here, what about heavily censored books?

> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable.

Same can be said about many books.

Right but is an AI company going to destroy a Gutenberg bible? No, as you said the content is not rare, and that's what they want.

So old books are valuable because old paper is valuable? I understand why the Gutenberg bible might be valuable but do we really need thousands of mass paperback novels?

Ask: valuable to whom and why?

- Reader: narrative

- Collector: scarcity of the physical artifact

- AI Company: language samples (quantity, variety), facts

They may have been made scarce by many methods, perhaps a low print run; court rulings; burning in a revolution to suppress dissenting views; scanning to avoid competitors to get the content and prevent other LLMs to reference, search, or train on it. Perhaps it's a particular edition that is rare (e.g., the first edition had a different description and was thoroughly changed in the second edition of the book, which may be important to have all the facts from someone's biography).

> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

That is literally the opposite of how it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity

Nobody's said it in this thread so I'll drop it here where you ask "Why save physical books?"—

The problem isn't with morals or copyright. What we're up in arms about is case law. Past rulings have implied that destruction of books significantly contributes to the process being "transformative". This encourages companies to destroy the books. I think this is really dumb.

Why save physical books? It's because the reason to destroy them isn't good. If you think there's too many bad books out there, that's a different argument. Maybe your fight is against consumerism, I don't know.

I agree with you for the same reason I think McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world!

Massively missing the point. Having paper books isn't the point. Preserving copies of books is the point, so history isn't lost. Often those books only exist as paper copies due to their age. I don't really care what happens to the paper copies, only that their content is preserved in a way that is accessible. Anthropic's private servers aren't it.

> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

That's what I keep saying about the van Goghs I burn to heat my home but everyone is still mad at me!

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