Forget publishing, companies like misanthropic are buying rare books and destroying it.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

jsphweid an hour ago | parent | next [-]

When they do this, are they buying a single copy of say Book A and destroying a single Book A copy? Or are they buying every copy they can find of Book A and destroying all of them?

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ComputerPerson an hour ago | parent [-]

Elon recently (2d) tweeted about making sure they preserve rare books and "scan them the hard way". That tweet launched a cultural wave of opposition regarding the debinding of rare books.

The discussion has been around, but it's flared significantly recently. Not sure if that's what the person you're responding to is specifically inflamed about.

Regardless, old/rare books are certainly being acquired and destroyed.

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gowld 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

No, he didn't tweeted about "making sure" of anything.

Elon tweeted "I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning"

which is no sense a credible source for what he actually asked SpaceXAI team to do, or if they are doing it, or what they were doing before yesterday. Elon has an extremely long and thorough track record of lying.

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2081844165881594362

	▲	ComputerPerson 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, I'm ambivalent to his veracity. The problem remains either way. Small operations around the globe are debinding rare/unique books. I'm involved with an organization considering (not strongly) that exactly. It's bigger than a single man's tweets.

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drivebyhooting an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean?

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an hour ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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taude an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

they're refering to this: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-de...

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KolmogorovComp an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To scan them, they usually have to resort breaking them into individual pages.

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wonnage an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

The scanning process destroys the book.

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jazzyjackson 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

Note it doesn't have to, it's just faster to.

Internet Archive scans their books one page at a time keeping the book intact and stored in a warehouse.

	▲	usef- a minute ago \| parent [-]
		They do in this case: the judge said that destroying them means that the text is being "transferred" rather than "copied". So the law wants them to destroy.