We could go out in the world, have experiences, cogitate upon them, learn to write well, and then do so? It ain't easy, but that's the way it used to be done.

All the books that they are scanning exist in the national libraries where they were published and have been for the past century or so.

Lets find a random conference book on Amazon... Genetics, Radiobiology and Radiology Proceedings, Mid-Western Conference. It was published in 1959. It's a rare book in that I can only find one copy of it on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Radiobiology-Radiology-Proceedings-Mi...

Lets go find it...

https://search.catalog.loc.gov/instances/e3fb7a94-2b25-5388-...

There's one copy onsite at the Library of Congress in the General Collections and another copy offsite. You can get a reading card for the Science and Business Reading Room ( https://www.loc.gov/research-centers/science-and-business/ ) and request that book and read it.

It also happens that my alma mater has a copy of the book too. https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999554514302121 - it's in the stacks in Ebling Library.

Every book that has been published, there's a copy of it somewhere. If it was published in the UK, it is in the British Library ( https://youtu.be/ZNVuIU6UUiM ).

The books are there.

What's happening is that these books are getting bought by AI companies and scanned. If they weren't bought by the AI company then... the book in the... I'm not even sure. It's in Portland... if inventory doesn't sell, it may instead get thrown out. Maybe this year, maybe in ten years - it costs money to have inventory that doesn't sell.

Libraries will do book sales of books that aren't checked out frequently. https://www.booksalefinder.com . Sometimes they're donated, sometimes it's library discards.

What do libraries do as they cull their collections?

https://nwls.wislib.org/what-to-do-with-discarded-books/

> Some libraries will donate weeded materials to community resale shops, Goodwill, or other resale shops. Some will take all of your unwanted books without question, but many resale shops don’t have the capacity to accept the large number of books that libraries discard. If you do find a place to take them, you’ll still need to use staff or volunteer time to get them there.

> You’ll often hear this idea from well-meaning community members, and there are some fun crafts that can be made from discarded books. A quick online search will turn up many ideas for ways to use your books in crafts for kids, teens, and adults, including folded book art, blackout poetry, collage or prints made on book pages, wreaths and garlands made from book pages, and more. But even if you do a LOT of craft activities at your library, it’s unlikely that you could use up enough of your discards to even notice the difference.

For example... https://reallifeartist.wordpress.com/tag/book-carving/ or https://www.cutandfoldbookart.com/cut-and-fold-method-instru...

These are books that used book stores (and libraries) are trying to get rid of to free up room for inventory that will move or shelf space for books that people will check out and read.

... but the last copy of a book can always be found in the national library where it was published... though if you really want to preserve Genetics, Radiobiology and Radiology Proceedings, Mid-Western Conference from 1959 from being slurped up by LLM training, you can buy a copy and shelf it yourself.

This is unironically part of their business plan: don't just regurgitate the world's information but also destroy all other sources of information.