Nondestructive scanning can cost 10x as much. This is about cost. It is not about preservation. Google never destroyed the books it scanned. Amazon and Anthropic are attempting to save money. They are not considering whether or not a book is rare. They are treating books as a commodity. Rare books are rare. It is easy enough to identify when there are a limited number of copies of a book. The issue is saving money on items which cannot be easily acquired. There are plenty of books where there are thousands of copies available. Destructive scanning of these books is not the issue. It is indiscriminate destruction of items that are unique and in limited supply. Rare books are more than their content, they are the typography, materials, design, smell, and physicality of the items which matter. They are often very different than mass market hard covers or paperbacks. Not every book initially was produced in massive quantities. This is incorrect. Many books before they became important were done in limited runs. The lists from what I am reading often include books which are limited in quantity. It seems to be an attempt to get everything possible, not just the massively produced items. The problem is making AI companies separate the truly rare and unique items from the commodity mass produced items. Nondestructively scan the rare ones, cut up the ones where there are thousands of copies.

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qarl2 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Given all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter.

I'm genuinely surprised they don't.

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hakanensari 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The price is more or less an indicator. If they can shred a $1000 book, kudos to them or their budget.

The idea they're simply shredding human history is too one-sided and alarmist. There is a huge long tail of rare-ish old and scrappy books out there that are definitely not the last copy of anything.

That said, I'm pretty sure a very small % of these books fall into the mistake category. But life!

	▲	qarl2 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been noticing a lot of alarmist stuff in the anti-AI community, too. I love how Oregon showed how to solve the electricity problem and is being entirely ignored. THEY'RE STEALING OUR ELECTRICITY!!!

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akudha 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amazon has been getting bad press for years now - union busting shenanigans, poor working conditions, low quality products, customer reviews being gamed etc. Why would they care? Unless bad press directly and measurably affects their bottom line, they wouldn't care. Just this week there was news about a massive datacenter they are planning whose power generators would become single biggest polluter in the country, if it gets built.

If they ever cared enough about bad PR, they have much bigger items to think about, like the proposed data center. Rare books probably wouldn't even make it their top 5 bad-press list

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kfrzcode 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm surprised you're confident they don't.

You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus?

Or is it like, technical manuals and incredibly dry almanac content?

I think the details actually matter here. I'd love to see a realtime list of these titles being scanned and processed. Then we'd know if anyone actually gives a care.

That said I'm willfully ignorant of most "headline news" so I'd be curious to see how heinous the issue really is.

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ForHackernews 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus?

I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is. I'd imagine they are dumped with a big crate of old books and an hourly quota they have to rapidly process.

Arguably old technical manuals with limited print runs are even rarer or more valuable to historians. We have lots of copies of Steinbeck, albeit not first editions.

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qarl2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is.

You don't think they are, at the very least, checking to see if the book has been scanned before?

A search like that could very easily be extended to check for rare books too.

Why do you assume it's not being done?

	▲	voidhorse an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Why assume it is? We don't know, and the fact that the process is so opaque and would have been totally undisclosed if not for journalists doesn't exactly make me confident they are "doing things by the book" on this one.

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cube00 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Given all the bad PR

Companies are immune to bad PR in this fast news cycle. Everyone has already moved on to the next injustice in less then 24 hours.

Surprisingly you'll even get downvoted for "living in the past" if you attempt to bring it up later.

	▲	lkbm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Companies discovered that they can pour tends of billions into clean energy and still be hated for destroying the planet. They can use a small amount of water and be blamed for draining the Great Lakes. Why would they avoid doing things people dislike if the PR outcome is the same?

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Teever 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm kinda surprised too, but also not, because they tried to hide what they were doing.

So that tells you that they know what they're doing is wrong / controversial and that they needed to shape their actions based on that fact.

The course of action they took tells you a lot about the people making these decisions.