I pre-empted this - my argument does not apply to texts where the physical object is a major part of the historical value of the thing. No, I'm not saying to destroy one of the four remaining Magna Cartas that were meticulously copied by hand. But even if I was, we're only dealing with texts here that are irrelevant enough to have never been digitised already - we tend to digitise most things of value and so the Mona Lisa and Magna Carta would never have been part of this discussion in the first place.

I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies were ever printed in a small town in Ohio in the 1970s as a test run for a failed book which was subsequently never commercialised.

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croes 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies …

What if the perception of those books change over time and are considered masterpieces later on?

Moby Dick was out of print when Melville died 1891 and not a huge success until it got a revival in the 1920s

	▲	stuartjohnson12 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When was the last time a formerly undigitised book that was printed but fell out of print suddenly became a success after being discovered in the last, say, 50 years? Is once in 100 years the sort of level of frequency we're talking about? This is the kind of rationalization hoarders use. The inability to get rid of things because it could turn out to be something we want in the future for reasons that we cannot currently describe. It's a loss avertive instinct that I think is misplaced. Treating every printed book as priceless is intractable. It's not how we treat these books at the moment. Apparently, today we don't even care enough to spend a few hours per book nondestructively scanning them in. Let's say we, instead of destructively scanning this books, nondestructively scanned them. What would you propose doing with the copies afterwards? Sell them? To who? They're valueless individually for the overwhelming part. Warehouse them? Why? For who? Do you want to go and look through them? Why haven't you done so already? Have you ever shown interest in consuming an undigitised book a single time in your life to date? It feels like the anti-AI crowd here have to tie themselves in knots here to make the loss minimization work.