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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?

Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?

>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.

When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.

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No. Almost none of the books you donate to the library get to the shelves. If they can sell it, they will. Otherwise they are thrown away.

I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".

> "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash"

That makes me a lot sadder than AI companies destroying the books but at least preserving (most of) their knowledge.

It's the reality. If you're old enough to remember when people subscribed to magazines ... how often did you throw out a magazine?

How often have you thrown out manuals for products you don't use any more?

As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices.

What happens when the books don't sell?

Our local library-connected biannual book sale puts a large dumpster, about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer, outside the warehouse where the sale is conducted. At the end of the sale it gets filled to the brim with waste inked cellulose, and sits there open in the weather until it's taken away for disposal.

Is that intended as an implicit threat - buy or we trash?

No, it's a demonstration of the lack of value of all that waste. On the last day of the sale (which decreases prices steadily over the several weeks it lasts) you can take a paper grocery store bag, fill it with books, and pay just $1. And yet enough books in the sale, enough to fill a large dumpster, don't even make that cut.

They are thrown away, which has been happening since forever, and nobody ever gave a fuck until AI got involved.

I think it hits different when you're buying large quantities of used books with an eye towards ones which aren't readily available online, and with the specific intention of destroying them.

If all these companies were doing was burning star wars tie-in novels and harry potter sequels nobody would care. That's not their goal because they already have those in their training set. The whole point here is to find rare or underappreciated books from the pre-digital era which nobody ever made publicly available in a digital format.

BTW destroying them isn't even necessary for scanning. It's the easiest way because removing the binding and turning it into a flat stack of papers solves many problems but there are actually dedicated book scanners designed to hold open the book while its photographed, and un-curling pages in post-processing was already a solved problem long before people were using AI to correct images.

Realistically the vast majority of those books haven't been touched for half a century and won't ever be read by a human again. It is a price to destroy these, but it's a price I would pay for progressing models towards AGI and the billions of lives it will save.

> When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.

Many books aren't lent and not bought and most libraries have limited space to store such books, thus they go where old paper goes.

Of course some rarely lent books are important and for the one person asking for it in ten years really valuable, but many still have to go.

As someone who has gone to many many used book sales over decades… many of the books at a sale never get sold, guess what they usually get tossed in the dump. This includes your local library book sales. Books are heavy and worthless. Cheaper to throw away the ones that nobody picks up in a sale.

I know it comes at a shock but truly most books are absolutely worthless.

The average lifespan of a library book is 26 loans. For a popular book that could be less than a year.

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