The closest they got was admitting that the rare books weren’t anything that someone might care about in the sense that people assume when we hear “rare books”

> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.

Okay? But then why exactly where they considered valuable enough to warrant an entire article about them going to a book scanning facility? Without revealing anything about these books I have no idea if they were classic literary works that were underappreciated, or if this was some old guide about How to Use Microsoft Office 97.

There was a more balanced take on Twitter (which I’m unable to find again, because Twitter) from a book seller who said it was more of the latter type: Books that were rare because they were no longer in demand and most everyone had thrown their copies away. Some parts of the media are doing backflips to try to imply that these are cherished literary classics being fed into the shredder to deprive humanity of something valuable, but the book seller seemed happy to be making sales for useless old books that no human was interested in buying.

I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940s, but it's been out of print for decades and I had to pay $150 for a "fair" copy with missing dust jacket.

I have an interest in older technology and the old ways of doing things (for instance, how do you lubricate the mast of a gaff rigged boat so the gaff jaws don't jam?) I've often found myself reading very old books that have been out of print for a century.

Sometimes I read those books at libraries and I've been the only person to check them out in years (I started doing this back when they still stamped the return date on a card so you could see when it was checked out). Now most of those books have been disposed of by libraries due to yield management software and I've ended up with some of them in my personal collection, but people like me can only save a tiny sliver when most of them are being bought in mass by Sam Altman. When they're gone the knowledge in them is also gone.

We are burning the library of Alexandria and the HN consensus is "those books probably weren't saving anyway."

Real humans sharing their unique knowledge, packaged in a book.

Do you, or anyone else, have any source suggesting that they’re buying highly valuable rare books and shredding them?

The kind of $150 rare book that you had to buy from a specialty collector who graded it is in a completely different category. You’re thinking of “rare books” in the historically rare, valuable, and collectible category.

The book sellers shipping off orders of 1000s of books at a time to these facilities are calling the books “rare” because they may only have 1 copy, not because it’s a collectible with a high price tag.

For instance there were only limited production runs for a set of books on South Africa's participation in the Second World War, and getting hold of them is increasingly difficult. But they have ISBN numbers, so they fall within the group of books being collected and destroyed by AI companies, and as a result might disappear altogether, along with the knowledge inside them.

That's not happening though.

Because none are.

This is literally what the publishers asked for. If they wanted a different way, they're the copyright lobby. They are making all the rules. They can change it.

There are several things to criticise here, including the US’s terrible copyright laws and the publishers involved in that case who care more about in-print than out-of-print books.

But it’s the AI companies that are actively buying up and destroying books at an unprecedented scale, which is an action they’re choosing do to and certainly don’t have to do. Therefore that’s also where the immediate focus and attention needs to be

I'll ask again: Does anyone have a single example of this?

Every conversation about this topic has been full of this same assertion, but nobody can ever name even a single example. We're supposed to believe it's factual.

Notably, one of those piece of evidence from that Anthropic case was an internal presentation clearly stating the intention of Project Panama was to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Beyond that, some book sellers have named specific titles, such as “an Estonian translation of John le Carré's The Mission Song, a specific edition of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and the October 1983 issue of Warship monthly magazine” and “everything from 18th-century African agricultural implements to biographies of 1950s racing drivers.”[0]

But getting a full list of all those sold globally is difficult. I imagine we’ll start to see some efforts to try to encourage booksellers to contribute to public lists though.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-irelan...

I suspect folks are over weighting how much knowledge is being destroyed in these books. If someone actually quantified it that would be amazing but as someone who started going to used book sales at a very young age I just have no sympathy. Most books are worthless. I don’t mean that from a text perspective either.

AI companies are not doing the same.

Far more people will use the model than would ever have read the book.

It's not at all the same thing as still having the books themselves available somewhere.

People may not even know the book exists or that it contains the information they want. Obtaining access to a copy may be very difficult, even if it is not particularly rare. The AI is much more accessible.

You're defending the indefensible here.

They can't legally publish the digital copies, and you know it. Training is fair use but direct copies are not.

They don't have to scan and destroy these books, it's an entirely voluntary choice.

You should be pushing for better copyright law not Amazon for buying up worthless books.

I would be also interested in participating in your costs.

https://cdlib.org/west/ https://papr.crl.edu https://eastlibraries.org

In the UK weeding is at the discretion of the Branch Librarian. Books I checked out 15 years ago have now vanished from the system.

http://ukpbc.uk

Actually I expect that a copy of most books probably is still available in a copyright library but it might not be easy to access.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/we-dont-want-it-to-be-known-ins...

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/08/10/a-mysteri...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

https://dallasexpress.com/national/the-vanishing-page-ai-fir...

https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phis...

Materials like that may be very valuable to software / tech / HCI archeologists soon.

I can't get the tools or local know-how to straighten my scythe blade in a country where every cottage had a scythe less than 100 years ago, with the last scythe-native generation rapidly dying out.

Fast forward a civilizational collapse and that M$ Office 97 for Dummies might be as groundbreaking as a Guide to Using Roman Concrete

Thank you.

The AI companies digesting this stuff is a net win for humanity. And I'm not a fanboy! Ideally they'd upload them to Anna's archive too, but even if they keep it private forever, at least these books live on in some way in the model weights. Thats better than a landfill.

IMO that would go a long way to resolve any concerns about losing books. I still don't like the idea of extremely hard to find or last prints being actually destroyed for this, but it certainly makes it more palatable.

You might be right that they can't do that now. The simple path forward is to have these companies simply make a public commitment to publish the data when the copyright expires. I also think there is a space to be carved out, probably through regulation, to ensure that there is a clear path for these scans to enter the public domain, at the very least.

This is not just important for these specific books, I have written on other platforms and in other spaces about the importance of media companies and those who benefit from strong copyright laws to protect and generate profits and revenues to repay the public for the cost of that enforcement over time by ensuring that at the appropriate time, those works fully enter the public domain. That could mean a restructuring of the Library of Congress in the United States to become a modern Library of Alexandria to host data, and shifting to a registered copyright model where to gain the protections of the court, you need to upload/submit your copyrighted works for storage and eventual release. I doubt it would ever happen there because of the amount of money invested in tying up IP in the United States, but perhaps a more amenable location like the EU could help with that.

However it might work, part of the promise of the Internet was that information would be liberated, but we see every day how much information gets sent down the memory hole when businesses, sites or services shut down, or how regularly companies abuse IP related regulations to attempt to strangle competition. It would be expensive now, but it would create an incredibly valuable legacy of information for the future, and it will only get more expensive to build such a thing as time goes on.

If AMZN, et al. were burning books in good faith, they would be open about it, point to the party responsible for it, and provide a list of the burned books to allow the community to organize, scavenge and scan the endangered publications. Keeping everything secret is a proof of maliciousness.

Preserving books and providing easy access to the information in them is of utmost importance, this is certainly understood by the public and private entities who could do something positive about it - their actions in the opposite direction should be a wake up call, they're on the wrong side of this issue.

Because people are irrational when it comes to this topic. They say stuff like “book burning” when they see books being destroyed. Doing it in relative secret kept the crazies away.

If you are passionate about this topic, lobby for more funding to store archives in the public good. Expecting private parties to do it for free because it gives you the ick to see books destroyed is not useful.

More books get destroyed each year during estate cleanouts than any AI companies could ever hope to accomplish. Most books donated to goodwill or other thrift shops go straight to the dumpster and might not even have a set of human eyes put on them at all. These places act as sin eaters for folks to leave their trash with.

It would make more sense for government to accept digital copies for any book, and share the out-of-copyright ones. In the United States, we have a Library of Congress who could do it if a law were passed with funding.

Of course, because each company is happy to burn it all down to beat their competitors and being first to any content is most important, this will never happen.

Doing the scan within their own organization does not because it's within a single legal entity and there is no copyright issue involved.

You could overcome it through various means, including helping to set up a clearinghouse for bulk rights, implementing a data clean room approach that models could train on in situ, lobbying Congress for copyright law changes especially around orphan works, using Section 108 of the Copyright Act to set up a specific preservation vehicle like the HathiTrust, and other options.

I find it ridiculous that so many in this thread are acting as though AI companies are simply powerless to do anything but buy up and destroy these rare books.

That’s the whole point: Companies are doing this because it’s easier and cheaper for them, and those doing it now are first-movers who don’t care about how catastrophic the end result will be for the rest of society as they’ll have their training data moat.

It should be obvious, but the things that are most profitable are not always the things that are best for society as a whole. That’s why we have regulation.

Just imagine 20 years from now its hard to get books in print. AI companies can just change the history by altering their model's content.

I'm not to keen on corporations holding the world's entire print history in AI models.

Of course, actually benefiting humanity is only a minor, indirect concern for investors.

Not only can they not do that, they must scan physical copies because they are forbidden from using digital pirated copies from sources like this.

Anthropic had a big settlement because they were caught using downloaded digital copies. As a response they’ve ramped up their book scanning and others have followed.

This is a grave problem.

> you will (if the model is good) be able to get the knowledge out of it

That doesn't help with books that aren't factual in nature. "Getting the knowledge" out of a novel makes no sense.

Not even the title of one of those rare books?

It would seem the redaction of the rare titles is a way to avoid de-anonymization and subsequent harm to the business of the seller who agreed to place a tracker in one of the books. That being said, maybe they could have chosen a better methodology which would have allowed the disclosure of the title, although ultimately I’m not sure the title matters too much outside of their claim they were “rare”.

My neighbor self-published a book, printed I think 100 copies at his own expense. It's literally a rare book. I can't imagine he nor anyone would care if an AI company bought a copy, no matter what they did with it.

Maybe these "rare books" are first edition Mark Twains, and. maybe they're unwanted books that would otherwise have gone to be pulped. The distinction is important and by not giving any evidence or even a qualitative claim about the types of books, 404 media is being pretty weak here.

And beyond just benefit to society, don't forget how subjective the decision about what constitutes a "unique artifact" is. That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother. Not necessarily the ink printed on paper, but the information contained within.

The above is based on a true story involving archive.org's Manual Library. The idea that even such esoteric and forgotten information would get hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI and then destroyed in the outside world, such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it, is frankly disgusting.

On the other hand, now that the manual is in the AI, you can just ask the AI how to repair the sewing machine.

The information contained within has not been lost, and in fact has become much more accessible.

Like so often in its usage, the word "just" is carrying immense weight in this sentence. Please see "hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI [...] such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it"

> has become much more accessible

This accessibility rests on a number of assumptions, not the least of which is Amazon's (of all companies) charitable good graces in offering access to their AI at an affordable price. It also assumes that the model can accurately regurgitate the text without hallucinating about other, similar machines, and that it can faithfully recreate any diagrams.

That ain’t a rare book.

I would also be shocked if you couldn’t find a way to repair and use this 1966 sewing machine… so it seems like a red herring.

Thanks for your opinion. I see you disagree with my first point.

> I would also be shocked if you couldn’t find a way to repair and use this 1966 sewing machine… so it seems like a red herring.

"Repair of the sewing machine is obviously simple and thus left as an exercise to the reader."

Seriously, though, I'm trying to say that you can't make that call for me. You can think that, but I know from experience repairing old machines (with more or less sentimental value) that having the original manual can be the difference between fixing it and irreparably damaging it. I could also, in turn, suppose that you probably do not actually collect and preserve rare "unique artifact" books, and therefore your argument about them is a red herring. But then we would both just be casting aspersions.

However, a title can be cross-referenced against purchase histories in probably under a minute.

The rare qualifier is used precisely because no reasonable person thinks this is stealing.

https://styleblueprint.com/everyday/the-quiet-theft-ai-steal...

It is still stealing even if the book is common.

Nothing good comes from hoarding whether it being toilet paper, money or knowledge.

No reasonable person thinks buying 1 of something is "hoarding".

(small historical irony: when Amazon first started selling books, they used the Books in Print database, which included a lot of books not actually in print.)

These LLM training runs have already ingested essentially the whole public internet. What marginal value is to be gained from scanning and destroying obscure books?

For me the biggest functional issues with LLMs don't seem to have any connection with "I wish they had read this obscure community cookbook from 1946". Is that going to get Claude to stop saying "honestly" to me? Is it going to get LLMs to stop making up sources that don't exist? What is in it for Amazon or any LLM company to chase more obscure data like this.

I can only think of it being a 'low-background steel' situation where they want to locate original, non-digitized text for validation or knowledge bases.

In any case, all the indignation about destructive digitization misses the point that rare books takings space in a warehouse for years without being bought will eventually be destroyed anyway.

It'll take a while before publishing collapses due to the availability of the same information via an LLM, but once this happens new books will get a lot more expensive for AI companies and a lot cheaper for everyone else.

My writing got better and better, and I got better publishers who actually hired editors, but the books sold fewer and fewer copies. Even crappy self-serving poorly written stackoverflow posts are often good enough. Then LLMs killed stackoverflow. Is that real ironic or Alanis ironic?

But I'm not holding my breath waiting for a book deal from OpenAI.

I’m sure I never read your book, but there is something cathartic about reading an admission like this. I have no doubt people got value out of your books, but I distinctly remember as a kid saving up to buy a couple expensive programming books from the bookstore and then being sorely disappointed in the way they were written. At the time I thought I was too young to understand adult writing, but when I went back to the books later as an adult it was obvious they were just written by amateurs. I still cherished them and learned a lot, but I will always remember the struggle of trying to follow along with what was probably some first-time writer’s attempt to learn how to write as they went along.

I think the common consensus is that stackoverflow killed stackoverflow, quite a few years before LLMs became entrenched.

Was this title eligible for class action status in the recent Anthropic scanning case? I know people who popped up on the list decades after writing obscure or forgotten technical titles. The estimated payout is $3k per title, usually split between publisher and author.

https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/09/07/the-anthropic-set...

I would check the settlement db just to make sure: https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup

You may entitled to a share assuming the publisher registered with the class action and there is a copyright registration in your name.

I always struggle with their articles because it feels like they built it for rage bait on a topic and leave the other interesting topics out of it. It is an absolute shame for books to be destroyed but what does it really mean to be rare here? I know they kind of tried to differentiate but it sounds like this could be John Doe’s self help book that never sold well. If you ever are connected to a library you will start to realize how many books simply get thrown out or sold for nothing because nobody wants them.

To me the problem is partly the copyright law. I think it’s. Hard problem but I always lean more towards books having short copyright shelf lives and making it legal for digital copies to be shared after which I think would eliminate I good part of this problem. Not to mention 99% of the books published are probably garbage but that is highly subjective.

So it is bit of a meta rant but I think there a couple holes to go down that could be extremely interesting but they always write these informationally light articles. Like scrolling through a NYT visualization for just some shipping datapoints. Don’t really dig deep on anything and then end with a trust me bro these are rare books that Amazon is destroying for AI when I cannot be that upset with the amazons of the world. There are a lot of reasons for a business to digitize books, most books are worthless and it makes sense to cut the bindings for scanning. I would rather talk about how could you fix copyright to make this less an issue but is it even an issue with how many books get thrown out?

I was going to say a very similar thing, and this is something I strongly disagree with when it comes to HN's moderation, and it goes like this:

The product is the outrage.

And HN should know better and mods should actively discourage, warn and prevent accounts (who karma farm, among other things) from even being able to post rage-bait articles. These aren't "hacker curiosities", they're just insipid bullshit. We wasted time and learned nothing.

Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

The difference is huge between 404 and Fox. Fox is out here trying to tell people there's a trans agenda, and that Biden was a lunatic leftist. They are just making up stories and publishing them because they know their audience engages. 404 definitely make editorial choices about which stories to pursue but I've largely found them to be grounded in real depictions of stuff that is happening.

I even imagine that the market price for these “rare” books is helping filter out anything truly valuable and rare. It just reads as a rage bait tmz article. The quantity of used books including “rare” books that get thrown into the dump is astronomical.

Here's a bookseller describing some of the books, which he believes are going to middlemen who are playing a sort of arbitrage with the AI companies by buying obscure titles, reselling them, and tossing away anything that doesn't sell. https://charliebecker.substack.com/p/is-an-ai-company-buying...

I suspect that's because folks wouldn't react the same way if they realized it was computer manuals for Windows 3.1. Even more obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be paying a lot for these books, so it seems outlandish that they'd be buying valuable rarities, since the booksellers would know the worth of those copies.

Good reporting on this would have included sales prices, volumes, and titles.

No, destroying collectible books would be a shame, not just any rare worthless books. But these are not collectible. The article tried to dance around it by saying maybe some books have a sentimental value to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean any library or collector wants it. Don’t fall for manufactured outrage!

Edit: Here’s an example of an extremely rare book. My great great grandfather published a book of sermons around 1920. That book has zero value to anyone other than my dad. Would I be outraged if it ended up at someone’s estate sale, then a used bookstore, and then an LLM consumed it to learn to read? No; I would have expected it to have been discarded by humans before the LLM even got to it. Most of what we leave behind is discarded.

We've also seen a website that collects old paper restaurant placemats from across the ages. Literally disposable, zero value items that were made to be discarded by the thousands.

And yet, when someone has an interesting idea that ties them together, makes us recollect or think about our past in some novel way, these useless uncommon things suddenly become quite interesting.

A book on sermons, o its own, from the 1920s is maybe not that interesting. A book of sermons selected from each decade? A collection that compares regional books of sermons? A compare and contrast of the 2020s and 1920s? I can imagine many interesting thesis where a book like that becomes interesting because of the context of other books that are juxtaposed to it.

A book on Detroit motorways and bus schedules from the 30s isn't interesting or valuable on its own. But when you contextualize it, suddenly it might be a way to understand our history, our path through development and redevelopment. Connecting our present moment to the past.

We got started when another ministry moved out, and sort of from zero. My pastor's clear instructions to me were: make sure everything we carry is doctrinally sound.

So we inherited several full collections of books in rapid succession. Some had even belonged to priests and religious. Those gave me a fascinating time, because I could basically rubber-stamp every title that a priest had in his personal collection. But slowly the balance began to tip into rather esoteric volumes that normal laypeople couldn't really use. Literally books full of sermons and other arcane subjects!

I was tasked with discarding/recycling all the rejects. There were tons of rejects, believe me! So with every session when we had boxes full of donation, it was imperative to cull the bad stuff very fast, shelve the rest, and then find somewhere to dump the trash. The manager was encouraging me to recycle, or at least not tip them all into the Dumpster, but it turned out to be a logistical nightmare to find anyplace that would recycle books like that. Having no vehicle, I had to continually figure out ways to cart around heavy loads, just to get them out of church and into the trash somewhere. That was the worst part of my job.

Now it was clear that books were not a very hip or current medium, but there were plenty of elderly parishioners who did appreciate the resource and did compliment my work, but our church was not free of prejudice or judgementalism, and let me just say, there was an angel or entity whose purpose was only to jumble all the books while I wasn't watching, and leave a deliberately unorganized mess for me to confront every week. This made the task distinctly Sisyphean, in addition to the need to constantly discard rejected books.

I finally threw in the towel when large boxes of Spanish-language books were donated; there was no way at all for me to vouch or determine their orthodoxy, and the shelves were full anyways, and I was just tired of propping up a legacy ministry anyway. But it really drove home my opinions about books, hoarders, and that is why I have no troubles with the way books are currently being treated.

Rare invokes images of limited edition runs of well loved books, when in reality it's probably extremely outdated software guides, how-tos, technical manuals, etc.

2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725

21 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738

It also seems that American society has been swept away by the worship of books, rather than literary appreciation or promotion of education. "Banned Books Week" as the primary exhibit here. A tug-of-war over books that are supposedly "banned" when the verb itself has been twisted beyond recognition. I see posters and television shows and public service announcements that promote "Books!" and "Reading!" for no other purpose. Many books are trash and they will fill your head with garbage as sure as social media can, so why the indiscriminate worship of books?

It is conspicuous that, aside from established booksellers, and perhaps the LFL owners, many of the people crying out and moaning over book-destruction seem unwilling or unable to actually take those books in and store them. That is the point, that these books are unworthy of taking up storage space, which is an ongoing cost, and maintenance, and therefore, it is fiscally responsible to sell them, scan them, and destroy them. If you want to dedicate a room full of shelves to books that nobody will ever read, then go ahead and buy out your local bookseller! They will not stop you or cancel your order! Tell them you are saving those innocent books from the Big AI Bugaboo! They'll grovel at your feet!

Also now, I'm seeing small booksellers who feel "suspicious" or "skeptical" about large book orders. There was one Down Under who said "oh we got an order for over 70 and we can't physically handle that!" I feel like it's becoming a "shut up and take their money" situation. These booksellers, as professional business owners, should know that they may never liquidate stock, and this is their golden opportunity to simply get rid of some of that excess hoarded inventory.

But if you're merely cosplaying as a bookseller, and deep down you're a hoarder and a worshipper of books, you may really be reluctant to do transactions or earn money that sells away your books.

In contrast a digital book has no such marks. It's impossible to tell if it was redacted to hide inconvenient passages, or even completely rewritten or fabricated (which can now easily be done at scale with AI). If the physical book is a primary source then the digital version must be considered a secondary source: A potentially biased retelling.

For this reason, a digital book can never be a perfect substitute for the physical book it was created from.

What if a person with small children and an elderly, incontinent pet with a penchant for peeing on books wants to buy it - can I sell this book to such a dangerous purchaser who might destroy it?

I love book as much as the next person but the hyperbole about "rare books" is absurd. Nobody is buying the Gutenburg Bible and destroying it for AI. The books in question are certainly not rare enough to be in museums - without titles there's no proof these are anything of real value.

This situation has absolutely no relation to that. This is the exact opposite, and the only reason this information isn't available publicly and is in risk of getting lost is copyright law.

TLDR: Amazon isn't the nazis in this story, copyright law is.

The verbatim content are the words, not the paper.

Books are lost all the time because the last book ended up in a landfill. But if an AI lab digitizes it, now it's stored in an extremely redundant storage lake in a datacenter and the company has huge incentives to make sure they don't ever lose that data.

Anyway ... this case is:

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:24-cv-05417-WHA, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, decided by Judge William Alsup

“the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a fair use.”

https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...

Obviously this violates precedent, I had an internal LLM (probably a frontend for Claude or ChatGPT) find them (just like the convictions for file sharing in the 2000s required counter-to-the-law reasoning by judges, fair use was almost never accepted as a valid excuse, even when it obviously was, but of course Sony was a billion dollar company and needed to be in the right. In fact that this had to happen was explicitly given as a reason to create the DMCA)

Anyway, some precedents:

Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 118 F.3d 199 (4th Cir. 1997)

“Although the Church acknowledges that its sole remaining copy is not the one it originally acquired … it maintains that the remaining copy does not infringe Hotaling's copyright because it is a replacement copy…”

(this reasoning was rejected by the court)

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/118...

Atari, Inc. v. JS & A Group, Inc., 597 F. Supp. 5 (N.D. Ill. 1983)

... defendant sold a device for making backup copies of copyrighted Atari cartridges and argued that §117 permitted replacement/archival copying. The court rejected the broad replacement theory.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/5...

This very court has clearly declared that making a copy of a copyrighted work for replacement purposes is illegal, on multiple occasions.

I would like to point out that this isn't Anthropic's only extreme-WTF law violation. When the original judgement against them was made against them, they were forced to admit that using books to train models was illegal if acquired illegally AND THEN WERE ALLOWED TO KEEP DOING IT (thankfully the court never mentioned that part in the judgement so at least they can claim that was never decided when it becomes a huge problem in future cases as it obviously will). But that's not how this works. In my opinion Anthropic and OpenAI and everyone else need to at minimum take training material that was acquired in violation of copyright out of their training data unless and until they have a separate licensing agreement with the copyright holders. As long as Claude knows more about Harry Potter than is said in the promotional summaries it is obviously in violation.

Because of the copyright-filesharing court wars of the 2000s, which were also handled dishonestly by courts (whether we're talking US or EU courts), and the absurd copyright extensions, they had to now make some new excuse, and settled on this very sad, very destructive option. It's not even defensible legally, imho, but of course the biggest wallet must win. I don't understand. It's such a sad joke at this point, and it's not like the courts even still had credibility after the file sharing cases.

I wonder which sad excuse will be forthcoming from the courts when we have someone release a movie made by an AI model that is obviously a direct ripoff from some high-budget studio movie, and Disney needs to be protected from ... say ... "Scorched: Brothers of Aridelle" — In a vast desert kingdom, the royal brothers Elias and Anders grow up together, but Elias secretly possesses dangerous fire magic and isolates himself after accidentally hurting Anders as a child; years later, at Elias’s coronation, Anders announces his engagement to the seemingly charming Princess Hanna, provoking an argument that exposes Elias’s powers and sends him fleeing into the dunes, where he accidentally unleashes an endless heatwave that dries the kingdom’s wells and turns the capital into a furnace ...

This is the citation needed that is missing from every report so far, including this one which deliberately refuses to reveal anything about these books.

You’d think if there were examples of actually valuable, rare books being shredded that the journalists would at least be able to name one such example. Instead it’s always vague posting about the destruction without ever naming any examples.

I think it’s because if they named some example titles, everyone would see that they don’t care about these books being shredded.

If the books are really worthless as you say then their case would be proved transparently.

This article presumably had to maintain confidentiality to protect the seller who agreed to place a tracking device in the shipment.

I would say the burden of proof is on the companies destroying human cultural heritage en masse, not the handful of journalists calling for attention to the matter.

You're literally assuming the conclusion. The exact topic under contention is whether they are "destroying human cultural heritage".

I just looked for one novel, which wasn't a fantastic book, but it is the first use of a pithy and fun phrase that is so ubiquitous that you'll probably read it a couple of times today. I argued with Claude, GPT and Gemini for ten minutes just now, even knowing the title of the book, to even prove the book exists. It took me years to find a copy originally and then I lost it in a move. I found one more copy today from a rare book seller, but it just sold (to Amazon?).

Is the book valuable? Not particularly, but I feel it's noteworthy and important. I don't want to name it either, because now I have some searches out and the next copy that pops up I'll scan and put on IA. There can only have been a few thousand copies originally published in 1947, it's only in hardcover. I know of a couple of other copies in private hands, so it's not zero copies, but it has to be single-digits.

I have one periodical issue that I know of only one other existing copy (Worthpoint only shows one copy ever sold in their database) and if you look on collector sites there is a blank because nobody even knows what the cover looks like. I can't explain it, since the publication routinely printed hundreds of thousands of copies of each issue, but here we are. Perhaps all the copies were withdrawn and pulped immediately after publication for some reason? It's in my scan pile, so I'll have it uploaded soon. Is it significant? Not hugely, but every other issue of this title has been scanned already, so it's scratching an itch to get this one done.

There's definitely rare stuff getting scanned and shredded. Someone in a comment above said it's not like Nazi book-burning since they were trying to destroy information. But it is like that if you consider there remain no other physical copies and all the electronic copies are locked up in a way that nobody can access except to trick an LLM to spit out a paraphrased copy from its training data.

So books that would probably have ended up as trash. These AI training facilities are actually doing these book a service. Not only they are probably going to keep the scans safe (for future training), but having the book end up in an AI model may be the only way it is going to have any use at all.

Let's say for instance that the book in question is about woodworking, and it is not great, lots of mistakes and inaccuracies, unoriginal content, etc... except for a single thing, maybe a trick for making a certain measurement or something like that. Who would read such a crappy book for this single good trick he doesn't know is there, well, an computer will, computers process terabytes of crap without tiring and complaining, that's what they are for, and with a well designed LLM, that one trick may resurface, waiting for someone to ask about that specific measurement.

The problem here is not that rare books end up in AI training facilities, it is that these AI facilities are owned by for-profit companies keeping the data to themselves. These books should go to public libraries instead, for everyone to access, it would be better if these books weren't destroyed in to process too. But the question becomes: why didn't public libraries didn't do that in the fist place? And maybe in a more respectful way. The AI companies would just have had to license the database to libraries, probably simpler and cheaper than having their own scanning facilities.

To me, this mess is a failure of the copyright system. One one hand, large scale book digitization projects intended to preserve and make the original text accessible get lawsuits by publishers, while AI training is "fair use". It means we have built a system that encourages destroying rather than preserving these books!

You could easily write an article about how Goodwill and the Salvation Army dump millions of "rare" books that no one would ever buy for $0.50. And thrift stores will dump multiple copies of said books. AI companies would only ever need one!

The only thing I disagree with is AI companies feeling entitled to freely use every piece of copywritten work without restriction, but that applies just as much to web scraping, pirated books, etc.

I'm not really aware of many benevolent acts Amazon has taken in the past decade. Are you?

Because it's not just one company doing this, it's dozens if not hundreds of them, all with huge budgets and all competing over the same dwindling supply of older books. What those talking about library disposals and similar measures are missing is the sheer scale that destructive book scanning for AI ingestion is operating with. It's unprecedented.

It's not impossible that in a few years the number of older physical books for sale anywhere will plummet to almost nothing and that in many cases that'll include the last copies anywhere of particular titles. Second-hand book stores will close, and a ton of niche knowledge might be lost forever. It'll also all have been done in relative secret, without any transparency or public record kept of what was lost.

Worse, it's something that can only be done once. If our societies don't do something about this now there isn't going to be a chance for a do-over. Once a physical book is destroyed it's gone forever, and we'll be lucky if there's a digital copy left. But even then digital copies don't provide the same level of forensic verifiability that physical copies do. Future researchers looking for material that might've been contained in books like these will be out of luck.

If our societies do nothing to stop this, we'll all be poorer for it.

Just another reminder that piracy remains the absolute best archival strategy we have.

Many other rare books are just rephrasings of other books on a given topic and this can be done with synthetic data generation now. Same goes for websites

Honestly this feels like a US exclusive problem. Like shipping from overseas would be way too expensive for the cheap books they want. The Chinese just use Anna's archive instead

Here’s Tom’s version:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...