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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

No, that’s the hyperbolic reaction clickbait wants from you.

Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria.

Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled.

Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often give this great moral weight to ever book in a way that is totally disconnected from reality.

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I don’t think any of these people know.

All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned.

Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.

And I don’t have any reason to think some reddit librarian knows what’s going on, if anything, either way.

> Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.

Then they should list the names of these books otherwise I say they're alarmist.

If they have, I haven’t seen it.

It’s very possible I’ve just missed deeper reporting, obviously.

But otherwise I agree. I’m neither losing sleep over it or just trusting that these (historically kinda scummy) businesses are actually behaving.

If there’s a serious problem I’d like to see something more concrete. Same for hand-waving the question.

I heard from the first stories that virtually all of these books being ordered have ISBN numbers. Books that are rare that have ISBN numbers are rare because no one wanted them 99.9% of the time. Somebody wants every book, but you'd spend many, many years finding that somebody.

If they have no value why are they being acquired and scanned?

A flagship LLM today is trained on tens of trillions of tokens, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of 100k word books. No human has that kind of appetite.

As an aside, the entire Google Books corpus is generally estimated at tens of millions of books.

Any original text has value for the purpose of AI training. The argument is that they have no other value.

Exactly. It’s the funniest thing. These books are only being bought by AI companies. It seems pretty clear they only have value to AI companies. Otherwise all these people bemoaning the loss of rare books would be… buying them.

“How dare these companies buy rare and valuable books that nobody else values enough to buy” is a self-canceling argument.

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