I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.

A few days back, I spent some time going through a World Book encyclopaedia set that my parents had bought for me when I was 4. It was basically an expensive investment back then into what would turn into a lifelong reading habit.

Most of the information in it is practically worthless today unfortunately - Saddam Hussein still alive, as were Katharine Hepburn and King Hussein of Jordan, no mention of Ceres and Pluto was still a planet, and the Internet and software had barely a mention. Most articles had less information than a standard Wikipedia article.

That being said, the way information was presented in them still outshines anything one may find on the internet today. Even the simple elements - neat diagrams and relevant images, proper sectioning and organization of the text, footnotes to other relevant articles...

Long gone are the days when I would simply take a bowl of ice cream and a volume and just read it end to end.

They legally cannot do this.

Both Anthropic and Internet Archive have gotten sued into oblivion by publishing companies once, there's no way they're going to do something even more flagrantly illegal

My understanding is they cut off the binding for scanning. They'd have to resell it donate by the page

A judge ruled it was OK to scan books and save the scanned copy if you shred the physical book afterwards.

Do you have an actual point about scanning the books, or are you just using this as a soapbox to rant about AI and Sam Altman?

The internet basically never delivered on the promise of replacing textbooks or even education as a whole. Wikipedia sucks on many topics, has insane internal politics, and is a tertiary source by design (redigesting blogs and books), whereas textbooks are generally secondary.

> the information density of published books is a lot higher than most internet text

I'm not convinced. I think you are under-weighing the massive volumes of stuff like self-help books, romance novels, etc.

I see. So it is much less about 150 year old fiction books, but more about 1980s science literature that was only ever printed five times. That makes a lot more sense than what the public debate seems to be about.

Also the ability to set the training input limit in the past could be useful.

Maybe for current in print books, but the concern is about rare books being pulped in this process. If a book is rare then it isn't in print, so nobody is making money out of it.

A book, song that has been out in public-domain for more than 10 years, should be downloadable. Even if you were to rebuy the same CD again the amount that the artist received would be a pointless pittance. Why not just let it be free to be enjoyed by all?

OCR Scanned for training, then tossed away or burnt. Great for nature.

Yeah. It somehow keeps the competitors at bay, apparently, from previous discussions about AI companies who burn books.

Can we really trust these AI companies when they're basically assimilating human art and culture and everything, only to go on and destroy the evidence?

I don't understand why can't they donate the books somewhere. Even if they don't want to share the scans, why not give up the books?

Give them away. Put them on the street for people to pick up. Donate them to anyone. I can't tell if you're being serious or if your comment is sarcasm. I'm leaning toward the latter.

"the engine of human progress"? I think you mean capitalism.

> the books being burned by these misanthropic lunatics are not available in any other medium

prove it, name one title

> this is not about fascination with some particular mediumn of transmission

it very much is. this fetishism of books should really stop, especially when ebooks are more useful, durable, etc.

> Most books really are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Yeah, but like I said in the comment you are replying to, somewhere around 1-5% of books are worth the paper they are printed on and far more, and those are exactly the books the labs are trying to scan and destroy, they are not buying pallets of books and scanning them in order to scan the june 1995 tv guide for the 800th time, they want unique, interesting, and high quality text, because that's what feeds pretraining.

The simple fact that the AI labs are spending billions of dollars to acquire and scan them implies they are rare and unique.

They sat in boxes

"Once great literature—now great litter."

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.

Well, in this case, I imagine they mean by shredding books after scanning them. Since that's what's happening.