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 [-]

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