- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
What is a rare book, exactly? Why can’t the publishers just print more if there is demand for them?
Keep in mind that books often become culturally important decades after their print run, sometimes when the copyright is ambiguous.
And also keep in mind there are technically, an insane number of “rare” books out there, but important rare books might only be important to people without the money to pay for another printing.
I could almost forgive this prrocess if they were /also/ archiving these books (leven if limited ike Google books does), but they won’t, because they are so focussed on staying ahead of compeditors based on the “knowledge” in their training data.
Maybe theyre from publishers that have since folded, and the original plates or print-copies are lost in some storage yard, or a tip face.
It depends on why the books is rare, some books are rare because they are not popular while other because they were banned. For example I know a novel were the English translation is easily available, but the original language is rare because it was banned in the original language in multiple countries. Don’t forget collecter artbooks that were never digitised.
Im assuming for pre digital era books, they don’t have the equipment (printing plate) anymore. But yes, presumably anybody could just print the scans with a modern printer?
Yes… If they were archiving their scans. Which isn’t happening.
I have this great book about all the glassware in use in 1940s chemistry.
As someone whose entire library is focused on the history of science: what’s the citation?
Lots of them are uninteresting and useless to 99.99% of people IIRC (examples I saw in a French article a few months ago was very precise history of some random villages in Spain or something similarly ultra specific)
When destroying books, we don’t actually know what will be important in the future. That’s why archivists spend so much time archiving mineutia without trying to curate. Those are different jobs and you can’t curate for the future.
Yeah I’m not saying these books are objectively uninteresting and useless and that they should be destroyed to feed some water-hungry plagiarism machine, but that is why they are not being re printed : barely anyone is buying them (despite them being rare)