It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright.

And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick. It's ridiculous that in the 21st century, publication standards have fallen to the point where for most works a disposable format is the only type available - where no amount of money could buy a truly decent hardback copy.

If we have to have copyright laws, I'd like to see two changes to them.

When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print, without compensation to the original publisher, and with renegotiated royalties for the author.

And if the publisher keeps a book in print - but only in bestseller-grade materials, bogroll paper that furrows in any humidity and perfect binding that molts its pages a couple of dry seasons later - and if it refuses to print a durable hardback copy with signatures, good paper and decent print - something that will still be readable in several generations' time - any other publisher keen to have a crack at it should be able to, again without any compensation for the original publisher, though perhaps in this case, with matching royalties for the author.

We use a special guillotine type cutter to cut off the binding and then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely in case the book needs rescanned for some reason. We also keep the original, uncompressed copies of the books on magnetic disks.

We also go out of our way to try to find rare books published in 1931, 1932, etc. so they are ready to go once the copyright expires.

And no, no AI company has ever come to us and asked to run training on all of our scanned copies.

Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright?

IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright law than AI companies.

Scanning books you own should be legal from a copyright point of view, and not require shredding.

Second, one should think about abandoned property provisions for copyright works published more than 50 years ago and in danger of being forgotten: once challenged, either you as the owner have to prove that the work is preserved for future generations (e.g. in various libraries around the world), or you have to authorize further copies, or you give up copyright on the work.

Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers.

What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after the books that there's still copyright on. Second, when it comes to books, "old" doesn't mean "valuable" - plenty of libraries destroy old books because there's no demand for them, and storage costs you. This is how those scanning companies get books for so cheap.

Let AI companies do this. But require them to make the digital copies public. Maybe with a multi-year delay, to give the original scanner advantage to doing it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

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> You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal.

Is there evidence of this? Since otherwise they could very well be describing what is only occurring to in-print or non-rare books. (This is a genuine question since their post doesn't shed any light on it.)

I am not sure that physically destructing one copy of this type of book to preserve its contents digitally is so bad. Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable only for its content, not for the physical medium it's printed on.

Now that I think about it, The Judge is an apt metaphor for AI : "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

Leave it up for anyone to download and then compensate the copyright holders later.

In fact if ingesting these books for LLMs is fair use, us commoners should be able to read them for free. Maybe restrict commercial redistribution though.

https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...

The fix here is to change the law to permit training AI without destroying the original materials. But that is going to be a heavy lift.

Was was the alternative? Order them to stop quietly destroying their property, it is making someone else very upset?

> Bulk purchases also usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases.

Article is paywalled, but I saved a few quotes here:

https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/post/1026

Horrendous stewardship of humanities collective knowledge all for profit and the race to have the one god computer to rule them all.

As more time passes it becomes clearer that America’s AI strategy should’ve been a public private partnership where the public owned the datasets and the underlying models and we’d leave the productionizing of LLMs to private businesses

There is a word for that kind of behavior.

This is highly disturbing news; is this standard practice? What did Google Books do before?

The segment that talks about rare books:

> One professional bookseller who specializes in selling foreign language books on these marketplaces told me that, starting in April, he and other booksellers noticed a historic spike in sales. [...]

> This bookseller said his inventory is full of rare, foreign language, and low circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they’ll be even harder to obtain.

> It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control

I find going after shadow libraries to be much worse because law enforcement is trying to prevent discrimination of knowledge to the public.

The real blame here should be going onto copyright laws.

Anthropic could take more care by figuring out if the books are still affected by copyright.

But this is just a company trying its best in an unfortunate regulatory environment.

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https://annas-archive.pk/donate

Say i feed the largest LLM a book of an alien civilisation, that it definitely hasn't seen before. Then this tiny piece of text muds the vast ocean (latent space) of the model minimally. It will not be able to cite from that book reliably after that fine tuning. Especially for rare books, because them being rare implies, that there aren't 1000s of other books, that encode the same information.

It's general language modelling capabilities might get an iota better, of course. But for putting factual information into it, wouldn't RAG be a much more solid approach?

I wish...

It's a real shame that no one ever got that book in front of Hayao Miyazaki's eyes.

It's sad in a romantic kinda way, because of the lost artifact, but the information is what makes the book valuable, not really the medium.

The out of copyright books don't really need to be destroyed anyway for them to be fair use for AI training, and arguable, even if you needed to, you only need one copy per title per company at most.

So it's not a gigantic loss.

Isn't that oxymoronic? If they can be bulk-bought they aren't rare.

Why would I spend hours creating original content if Google can extract it and present the answer directly in an AI Overview? What is the incentive to keep doing the work?

If creators stop producing high-quality original material, the information we get over the next few years will increasingly be based on recycled, low-quality garbage.

Weird to see so many of these "trust me bro" twitter stories make it to the front page and cause outrage when no one has any real information.

This is merely the latest incarnation. We can imagine a slightly different process on a few fronts - AI companies pay to digitize books (still for their own purposes), but are prevented from destroying the physical copies and they have to openly shared the digitized results. We would view that situation much more favorably - perhaps even as ideal, right?

Those two dynamics could be backed up by court decisions or laws iff they weren't so plainly at odds with how copyright has been and is generally implemented and interpreted. For example, imagine them having to do this through some nonprofit library whose goals was preservation and dissemination. Instead, libraries have been sidelined as things that operate at the edge of the law rather than vital public institutions, whereas shredding books in secret is fully legally condoned.

https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...

It's a weird practice to destroy a book when you digitize it, but it's at least an understandable legal strategy to ensure that the digital copy "replaces" the physical one. However, this is only going to apply to books that have active copyrights.

This author suggests that a rare 18th-century botanical text could fall victim to the same fate, but I am somehow doubtful that this is the case. Non-destructive scanning is trivial, and these kinds of books are likely being processed in a quantity that would allow for it without backing up the pipeline.

I really like 404 media, but it doesn't really seem like the evidence points to the conclusion here. Yes, AI companies are shredding books that they digitize, and yes, AI companies are digitizing old, rare books. But the rationale for the book shredding doesn't exist for the old, rare books, so I would need more evidence than just "putting two-and-two together".

At the end of the day, old books with no resale value, including rare books, end up destroyed with some regularity by libraries and bookstores. While this may be an excessively generous take, at least this way the books are getting digitized before they become pulp. The real tragedy will be if the old, rare books that were digitized are never shared with the rest of us, because they were ONLY digitized to train AI, and not to actually preserve anything.

Just one more book, bro, and we'll solve AGI forever. Trust us, bro, just one more book. Come on, let me have those words and we'll solve AGI forever.

Really? That sure wasn't a thing when one startup got sued for streaming from its wall od dvd-players, and they adhered to 1 disc = maximum 1 stream at same time.

But that would help competitors with training data, which I assume is why they don’t do this.

Luckily I don't live in NYC where book hoarders are being evicted because of "fire hazard". Just like in Fahrenheit 451.

Of course even disregarding this fact, this is utterly disgusting attack on humanity heritage, just as much as any group out there destroying what we should all cherish be it for the historical artifact they represent. Whatever how US judge name it, they don’t worth more than their same-behavior consorts that is terrorists and totalitarian governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

https://organiser.org/2025/07/24/304285/world/china-wages-wa...

https://www.historyexpose.com/things/demolition-afghanistans...

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-96432-9_...

Like, Library of Alexandria or Council of Nicaea bad.

We may never be able to recover the information if, say, one of these AI companies copied or translated it wrong then destroyed the source material.

Maybe it's from bad OCR, or maybe from a bad actor - but there are a lot of ways history and information could change in this game-of-telephone like transfer of knowledge.

What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing.

If we use 'shredding' to mean A book is laid flat, its cover is removed, and then a paper cutter cuts through the binding to create a flat stack of sheets, which are then fed to a sheet feeder, then I could maybe imagine this is better than a page-turning scanner. But, sheet feeding old paper sucks shit, bro. It's not fun.

Upshot, I think we'd like to hear from an anonymous frontier lab employee here to see what's going on -- there are a lot of books in Anna's archive available at considerably less difficulty.

These companies are regressive book burners.

Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content!

There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses that were never digitised. Even for beloved media, the BBC occasionally tracks down an old lost episode of Dr Who.

For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.