If you take the only remaining copy of book X and take it home to digitally scan it, then destroy the book and never share the scan, what has been lost?

Nothing? What's the difference of the vast rare books in private collections never scanned or public? Ever been to the rare book conference? None of those are public.

> What's the difference of the vast rare books in private collections

There's little difference and I would suggest there's a pity in knowledge being hoarded by collectors.

If we were getting into the differences, though, it would be that is now happening en masse in order for a handful of corporations to monopolise knowledge, history and ideas from books that were until recently available somewhere to the public.

I also doubt that many collectors are buying rare books with the intention of destroying them.

They won't destroy the books very likely but also the amount of capacity and money to do this on a huge scale is (as far as I know) totally unprecedented.

And it's irreversible when the books are really destroyed.

That combination makes it an urgent and important issue.

Libraries have been trying to do exactly this (digitising) for many years, without funding. Imagine the wealth of human knowledge that might be in proprietary llms after this? Will there be a path back to the source material? I hold out hope that this digitisation effort will preserve the digitised source materials in the public domain somewhere

The possibility of that content ever being accessed by someone beside you.

The qualia of reading the physical book? This is especially important with illustrations

The knowledge that was available to the public.

They weren't public?

The ability to cite a book as a source. No one is going to take a researcher seriously if they cite an LLM.

Do they upload them to Anna's Archive or IA?

Or do they keep it on their private, warded off storage?

Exactly as they were before then? Sitting in a book sellers private collection. But since we hate AI that is now bad.