As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.

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."

Im with you, my take-away from the article was of sadness for all the books that are going extinct because of this.

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

> As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.

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.

Once you start to realize just many books got thrown out annually before “AI” you have less sympathy. Libraries are one of the biggest contributors to this because there is simply too many books that nobody cares about.

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.

Please scan this book and put it into Anna's library, or keep it for the future.

I would be also interested in participating in your costs.