TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
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16 hoursfyi, they’ve been doing this for at least a year, if not more.
I believe this social issue cannot be fix without an actual bloody revolution.😔
- Tim_Bisley@piefed.socialEnglish1 day
For me if it is not possible to scan something non-destructively then it is acceptable to destroy one copy to share with many. It is not acceptable to destroy a book for non-preservation purposes.
Also they are probably destroying many copies of the same books over and over.
- 1 day
The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.
And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.
I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.
You are correct.
Just want to add one thing, there MUCH easier ways now than those kind of setups. Its just not as cheap/accessible. I worked at a library and there is specific setups for certain kinds of books you cannot reproduce and still need to get a good scan in.
- 1 day
Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.
- 1 day
They also exist with a vacuum puller that goes page by page, using a vacuum strip to hold the page tight to a scanner bar as it pulls upwards. Its just slower is all.
- 20 hours
The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.
Any particular reason why can’t you just rebind the book after? Even if it is with a different binding.
(And no, I don’t mean I’ll take “capitalism” for an answer)
There’s no use, those books barely have any cultural value. They’re unsold inventory, why would you pay to rebind them ? Nobody wants to buy them anyway.
Books (as in the physical object itself) are not rare or particularly precious they’re among the most mass produced objects in the modern world.
This reminds me of a book I read recently. I get like 30 $1 paperbacks at the library used book sale every spring / fall. When I’m done reading them they go on the unit book cart for the patients unless theyre wildly objectionable (and it takes a lot for me, I recently put out some only mildly tasteful furry badger shapeshifter smut).
Anyway this year I got something called “the king’s hounds” where the back summary sounded lit but it turned out to be super rapey (like Sean Connery bond just keep doing it until they shut up rapey). And it’s been sitting on my coffee table collecting dust since I finished it because it feels wrong to just throw it away but I’m definitely not giving it to my patients (who like, ALL have rape PTSD for some reason). I probably will wind up throwing it out but. Fuck. It just feels wrong to destroy a book for some reason even though that’s probably the only thing to do.
Yeah, same, if a book comes into my hands it’s pretty much saved but I understand that in their natural habitat their life span is not infinite.
- 19 hours
I can imagine a couple of reasons.
The most straightforward one actually is “capitalism”, but maybe if I explain it a bit you’ll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It’s like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for “disposal” in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.
The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There’s lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that’s easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called “signatures”, typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn’t leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that’s a cost that produces a book that’s probably worthless for resale anyway.
Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can’t blame them too much.
- raman_klogius@ani.socialEnglish17 hours
Ah, the poetic irony of scanning physical slop to train digital slop.
- ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais18 hours
I remember reading somewhere that there was a legal component to the destruction too. If they destroy the original it’s a transformation form physical to digital but if they don’t it’s a copy which can be illegal.
- frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish9 hours
I don’t think that would hold up in court. Transformative use doesn’t really depend on physical media.
- 24 hours
Plenty of approaches that don’t destroy the book. These are years old solutions. They weren’t first editions, but the point was there was no human with any archivist training making the decisions to destroy all the books. It was a free for all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLznMkyrCR4
Unfortunately it’s a lot easier and quicker to scan a book if you remove the spine, since it’s then just a bunch of pages that can be fed through an auto feeder. Proper book scanners that turn pages are slow and expensive.
I don’t like the idea of destroying books, but it’s certainly a lot less unsavoury to destroy a single copy to create a publicly available archive.
Not all, in fact probably the minority, of rare books have anything special about their binding. There’s one reference book I’ve been looking for a copy of that was only published 20 years ago in paperback, but copies regularly sell for £150+ on ebay.
- wax@feddit.nuEnglish4 hours
I was in that situation with a textbook costing about twice that. Ended up borrowing from the library and digitizing it myself using a camera mounted on the back of a hardwood chair with the book lying flat on the ground. In hindsight it would have been good with a glass plate to press the pages, but I unwarped the pages automatically using some open source software. In the end it turned out quite good, but probably spent 6 hrs or something on the ordeal.
