We've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem.

Companies are paying for the books now, great! And destroying a book is really the best way to scan it. I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them. A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies nowadays.

Now what books exist in a single copy that destroying it would amount to losing knowledge? In any case, I would also expect such books to be very old, have very little useful content for training to start with, and be expensive enough to buy to make training on them unprofitable.

So what's the problem here exactly?

Also from the article:

> It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

I'm all love for Anna's archive, but still, I find it rich that they now find themselves in position to make strong ethical claims.

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squidbeak 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies.

If you've read the articles covering this issue, you'll be aware the concern is over the fate of rare and out of print books, rather than your straw man (ie those available in 'thousands to millions' of copies).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

> "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's.

> "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century.

> "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

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JsonDemWitOster 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is there any indication that Anthropic is destroying books from the 18th century? Even the BBC quote is a conditional. Emphasis added:

> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.

IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.

I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?

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quietsegfault 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Rare and out of print does not mean important or valuable.

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squidbeak 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't automatically mean pointless or worthless, either. And it's too late to judge either way once it's been destroyed.

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Filligree 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Usually it means the opposite. Books that are old and valuable tend to be out of copyright, so they do see new printing runs.

	▲	squidbeak 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The British Library has a large quantity of books that have literary, academic, cultural or bibliopolical significance but are too niche to ever see print new print runs. This idea that there can only be merit in a work if it's commercially viable is incredibly ignorant, and if that becomes the standard for whether a work is preserved or not, we stand to lose a great deal of our cultural heritage.

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geye1234 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Presumably, being from the 18th Century, copyright law wouldn't apply?

Detestable if they're doing it anyway to prevent competitors getting hold of it.

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xandrius 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is that you probably do little research or read very few old books.

There are multiple instances of a book being referred within another book, while at the time the author had access to it, we might not have it today. Taking a rare book and destroying absolutely erases that link we have with the past.

You not seeing a problem with this is the core issue, it's probably why the people doing it (it's people destroying these books not aliens) just shrug and don't feel too bad doing that.

Old books are even more crucial than today's books due to how uncommon it was to have something written/printed and bound. Many unique and single copy books explain to us a ton of things about the past, sometimes for funsies and sometimes for useful findings. Destroying old books is akin to destroying the closest we got to time machines.

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brainwad 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Surely the people granted a legal monopoly to print the books will have kept a copy of the masters in order to reprint any lost works. Surely copyright works as intended for the public good and isn't just rent seeking. Surely.

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ForHackernews 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I can't tell if you're making a joke but many (most?) rare books predate the modern copyright regime and the original printing plates are somewhere in a 17th century midden heap.

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brainwad 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The books being destroyed are not afaik those sort of books. They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright (and hence can't legally be scanned non-destructively).

	▲	joshstrange 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright OR in-print modern books that they can get for cheaper by buying used. The whole thing is a manufactured outrage over something that doesn't matter. They aren't breaking into museums to steal their only copy of a book and burn it. They are digitizing books. If anything I commend them for what they are doing. If the alternatives were that book rotting on a shelf or being thrown away they doing a great service preserving it, even if they don't make it available publically (which they can't for copyright reasons). It's literally no different from them stocking a private library with these books, except it's better because digital copies are much easier to preserve.

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ab71e5 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is also legal to buy potatoes and burn them, nobody would care if I do it. But if I buy up a food supply enough to feed a country and burn it it would be wrong.

	▲	quietsegfault 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m confused - are you intending to say Anthropic and Google are buying ALL the books?

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josem 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the problem is precisely that for some books there are not too many copies around like you described and if they destroy them we might eventually lose access to them directly. It might sound too extreme, but I understand the fear behind this.

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FartyMcFarter 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is we don't know what we're losing, due to lack of transparency.

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anon373839 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem.

It’s powerful symbolism. It reminds me of that tone-deaf iPad ad that sparked outrage in 2024. The one where all the cultural artifacts were crushed in an industrial press to make a soulless slab of glass. And that was Apple, who is generally well-liked by the public.

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JohnFen 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them.

Of course you can. Nobody is saying these companies aren't allowed to do what they're doing.

But what they're doing is disgusting and something I can't forgive. It's an escalation of the attacks against society that these companies have been engaging in from the beginning. This isn't about legality, this is about what's right.