| ▲ | pshirshov 10 hours ago |
| Read more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies. |
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| ▲ | wasmperson 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I was also skeptical of this claim but managed to find someone who explains it: https://downtownbrown.substack.com/p/five-fallacies-ai-and-d... It's not that individual companies buy all copies of a given book, but that there's more than one book scanning company, and they aren't sharing the scans with each other. The result: books that were rare but nevertheless easy to find for purchase (thanks to the internet) are now vanishing off of the market, becoming de facto no longer accessible to the public. |
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| ▲ | demibabs 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Good article, but I still feel unsatisfied because even it cannot find an example of a book that’s actually been lost because of the destructive scanning frenzy (it only lists books that hypothetically could be lost because there’s not many physical copies available for sale online.). If anyone has an example, I’d love to hear it. | | |
| ▲ | voidhorse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Since we don't know what was actually purchased and what was actually destroyed, how do you expect us to furnish an example? This would require the destroyers to admit it, and beyond that it would require all of them to admit it since more than one of them might have been responsible for the extinction of one text. Seeing as they were already keeping this operation under wraps, I don't see that happening. "possibly extinct because no copies available online" is probably the best we can do. The distributed nature of the problem and the utter lack of transparency are huge factors here too. |
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| ▲ | quietsegfault 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Here we have another entry in the long list of "things described on the Internet that never happened". |
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| ▲ | mistercow 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most old books that are rare and unpreserved are so because their value is marginal, so nobody has bothered to collect and preserve them. But where did you hear that they’re buying “all copies”? And to what end? |
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| ▲ | dbspin 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a classic mistake. We have no way of estimating the future value of a given book. It's perceived current value (a large part of which is simply obscurity) may be low. But it's future value - to historians, ethnographers, to researchers seeking a specific fact or example of language use or a hundred other things - is literally inestimable. To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved. Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc. | | |
| ▲ | famouswaffles 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc. I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame. | | |
| ▲ | dbspin 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | OK... I'm going to assume good faith even though your wording makes it somewhat unlikely. Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be. Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera. Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago. | | |
| ▲ | famouswaffles 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think there are two issues here: 1. If someone is acquiring books in bulk for bargain-bin prices and shredding them, they're books whose physical copies have essentially no market value and which, absent this buyer, were overwhelmingly headed for pulping or landfill anyway. Millions of books are destroyed every day. Could one of these worthless looking books turn out to contain information historians care about in a 100 year? Sure. But that doesn't create an obligation for someone to pay to warehouse every extant copy forever. Physical Preservation has costs: space, cataloguing, handling, transportation etc. Archives and libraries have always had to make choices for this reason. 2. I'm not arguing that preservation has no value. The question is whether destroying a physical copy after digitizing it is a serious loss when talking about mass-produced printed material. Was this the last surviving copy ? Is the information unavavilable in libraries, archives, other editions, scans, citations, contemporary works etc ? If not, nothing has been lost except one physical instance of a reproducible object. Your film analogy worked a lot better because old film footage is often unique primary source material. A camera recording of a random brooklyn street in 1993 may literally be the only recording of those people, storefronts and circumstances. The nth printe dcopy of a technical manual is not analogous to that. | |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | voidhorse an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | How would film be any different in any capacity whatsoever? Believe it or not, what matters here is the message and access to the message, not the medium. |
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| ▲ | dataflow 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Where did you see they tend to buy all the copies? This comment is the first time I've heard of this. |
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| ▲ | wmeredith 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd also be curious about the provenance of that statement. Why would they buy all copies? What would be the purpose of scanning multiple copies? | | |
| ▲ | dataflow 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I could see buying multiple copies being useful to mitigate problems, like damage. But buying all the copies is categorically different and I cannot imagine why they would attempt that, except perhaps to prevent their competition from getting a hold of the same text? |
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| ▲ | p-e-w 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s just another lie of the type these threads tend to be filled with nowadays. Of course they aren’t buying “all copies”, and that wouldn’t even be possible in most cases since such books are usually flea market/attic material and most copies aren’t for sale (or even catalogued) to begin with. I’d be interested to learn who comes up with such lies though. Is it really just random people venting their frustration, or some kind of organized astroturfing operation? | | |
| ▲ | diseasedyak 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It really does seem like an organized operation, given that it's so prevalent and they all seem to be in lockstep with their specious claims. | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this outrage is fueled by the same actors as the AI data center water outrage. Whoever they are |
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| ▲ | vavos 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think these type of lies usually come about as a result of a game of broken telephone and things get exaggerated |
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| ▲ | sajithdilshan 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| what is your source? |
