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Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today)

Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.

The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.

The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.

This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.

The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.

> This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.

The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change.

That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.

The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'

That’s just not true. There is a clearly a right thing to do in many circumstances.

Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.

I can’t believe that in the multipolar world of 2026, where hundreds of conflicting world views coexist, where universalism is being disproven on a daily basis, it’s still possible to read things like “there is agreement on what the right thing is”.

This is as blatantly false as claiming that the Earth is flat, and the fact that there is no such agreement (descriptive moral relativism) has been firmly established in philosophy for well over a century.

If you think ethical arguments like "murder is bad" or "human knowledge should be preserved" and a demonstrable falsity like "the earth is flat" are equivalent arguments then you are so far gone you might as well be a flat earther.

Blind futurists and AI cheerleaders scare me on how cavalier and how many crimes against humanity they ignore.

A quick search suggests that most "weeded" books are sold on or donated rather than burnt or sent to landfill. Do you have sources that say otherwise?

Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning).

It is pretty standard procedure.

The difference everyone is missing, is that now there is commercial incentive to burn books aka destroy them after scanning. It's now a profitable business to do so, not something that only has to be done to clear up space

Ours has a volunteer run used bookstore that sells a few for pennies on the dollar. Vast majority are shredded

They should be happy to have a job at all in the Republic of Liberia.

Well if you're appealing to librarians:

"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.

Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."

https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...

I don't get the point of this one. We not talking about "retiring books", we talking about "rare but still fine books".

I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.

I don't think that changes the message at all. If a librarian doesn't like routine book destruction, they would still feel worse about this different thing that is happening.

I don't know what Liberia has to do with it.

Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.

The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.

If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.

I'm not a bsky person so I didn't click though but library books aren't "retired" to a farm upstate. My SO works at a library, they are mostly shredded. This is a nothingburger

I made sure the thread was public before I posted it here. It ends "Fuck, I have destroyed MY OWN books. I’m not overly precious here.

What Amazon is doing is vile."

    > The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today

If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue.

We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.

And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?

What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?

What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?

Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)

Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.

    > Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

    > The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-kill_shelter

re: saving books, at a personal level, I try to use the excuse of work to find, read, and do stuff with old books,

https://1517.substack.com/p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval

And yes, people still care. And people who care do things.

"No-kill shelters" are very rare and very controversial (thanks to PETA); most still have to kill by law (overpopulation), and they instead tend to focus on not taking in more than they can handle. They are very controversial because they are more of a "moral" than a "practical" solution to animal overpopulation. They try their best to let animals have their "normal natural life to the end". They are just more focused on the animals' well-being, kind of like a library for books, but they still have to kill if they overpopulate.

The main article is written like it is the "end of the world", just like your random rambling about "climate instability" is just the natural course Earth has been on for its existence, with melting ice.

Random article about powder and stone, completely irrelevant.

The old book mentioned was just a farmer's book; you can find all this history in the area's historical records.

"Skill issue." How old are you? I think it would help you more if you contacted a shelter and talked about what they really do.

Better sources than Wikipedia that explain what they do; it is, of course, different from shelter to shelter, but euthanising due to overpopulation is still part of it. (Like too many books in a library, they need to make room for other books that people want, if it just end up roting on the shelf and nobody loans it over years, either destruction or storage, most don't have space for storage)

https://bestfriends.org/stories/best-friends-magazine/debate...

https://lifelineanimal.org/the-no-kill-controversy/

Also, why are people acting like Anthropic digitizing and destroying a rare book is what makes it inaccessible to the public?

If they were simply buying the books and doing nothing with them, the public wouldn’t be able to access their copies anyway.

Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.

If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.

> we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.

Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.

> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.

The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.

Yesterday you could have purchased one of these books and read it. Good luck doing so today.

I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguably the most likely scenarios are either Anthropic survives and holds them away in perpetuity or Anthropic fails and they are sold off to the highest bidder who does the same.

Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.

They are destroying them because it’s easier to scan them if you slice the binding.

And very hard to re-assemble after you have done that. They are not in the book binding business.

I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.

Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.

No, they are destroying them because that’s the way that they can keep a digital copy legally.

This is not true. Google Books does not destroy books. No court has ruled that you must destroy books to legally keep a digital copy.

I think under first sale doctrine you have a much stronger case with destructive scanning. Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive's book scanning project have had a lot of legal expenses.

You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency.

Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.

> we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.

Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.

While not an authoritative source... https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... (and not actual book titles)

> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.

So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...

I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.

That data is useful as a source of scientific knowledge even if it's not current. Although it's probably already online, they probably don't want to download it and risk getting another copyright lawsuit

> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.

But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.

Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.

If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.

Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.

Destroying the physical copy inflates the value of the retained digital copy

>it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge

This sentence reminded me of “The Things” by Peter Watts. The Thing in that short story believes it’s actually the good guy and decides to commit “violent integration” for the sake of humanity.

I’m not sure I buy the links premise that Anthropic is doing this with malice, but if it were, would be an eerie parallel.

> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned

But unreadable by humans, right?

They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.

That was due to negligence. Now it is profitable to keep the books private, and actively deny others access to them.

Ah, yes, because we all know OpenAI and Anthropic are famously just front operations for the high-end antiquarian book trade.

That's an in house operation that benefits them, not a front.

High-end antiquarian book traders is a genuinely hilarious way to describe them and I shall refer to them as such henceforth.

Oho you think they're buying common books? Books they can find online already?

Those books at the flea market aren't "rotting", they are available for sale.

You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.

A lot of them are rotting. We are not talking "one of the three living copies of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses". Rather "1956 statistics of the cultive of yuca in 'some small village from Mexico': a boring analysis". Those books have value to train LLMs as they are 100% free of AI text, but has been collecting dust (or rotting) in someone's room for decades, and no human is buying them even for 10 cents.

Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.

No, they are not. A lot of them are rotting and get thrown or given at the end of the day.

You’re equating something being ubiquitous and affordable with it not being valuable.

Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!).

That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.