My point is I don't understand how someone can get mad about something they're not even sure is happening.
Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will?
Your concerns seem misguided.
But I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. You have a nice day.
I'm not sure why everyone on hacker news so often falls for the "my friends are jumping off the bridge, so I can too" fallacy. Not to mention, there are clear differences between the processes under consideration, which might bother you, even if the outcome is the same. No, I don't care that publishers destroy books because usually they only do that when the book has proven to fail to sell (not the case here, clearly, since the books were sold!) and out of necessity because of resource constraints and not because they are using them to build a proprietary alternative product they plan on charging me for. I don't understand why people are engaging is such shoddy, shallow thinking here.
I think the difference in our viewpoints ultimately lies in our faith in the companies involved. I have little to no faith that the digital scans of these texts will make it out to the public based on historical behavior of companies and the current legal complications around copyright. As such, I find it grossly unfair for several companies, which have significantly more economic and logistical resources than interested individual buyers, to systematically purchase rare works and thereby prevent individuals from accessing those works, possibly in perpetuity. The point is that even if they were to eventually release these, they are effectively, as of now, as of my lifetime, no longer available. Again, we have little information on the specifics, but it's the principle of the matter, the gross asymmetry here, that bothers me. It's all worsened by the fact that they are doing this so that they can use a commodity which you could have paid for once to train a new utility, tokens, that they want to charge you for on a metered basis.
If I understand you, you seem to be more confident that they might eventually release the works, or you are less bothered by the power asymmetries here. I actually do hope you turn out to be correct, and they find a way to release the material, or at least tell us what they bought. However, I doubt this will happen.
I hope you have a good day too! Thanks for sharing your perspective on the matter.