Edit: of course not, what an absolute shit article. “If you don’t dislike trashing a book you’re a bad person!!!” Basically. What an ignorant idea. The article linked in the first “article” (the first contains 0 information) isn’t much better, large companies buy books nobody wants, scans them and discards them.
Guess what librarians worldwide do? Well they don’t scan the books before sending them for recycling.
So an overly emotional trash headline to generate that sweet anger and engagement IMO.
Still plenty to be pissed about though. As someone who does archiving it’s still enraging because they are destroying thousands of books not for archival where you destroy one copy to provide access to all, but to copy the book, rewrite it, and sell it back to you.
There’s now less copies of said book, it wasn’t archived, they stole that content, and are now selling it back to you. People will then take this stolen content and act like it’s something they created and then try to turn profit. It makes every copyright argument the publishers have ever made look like a joke. Why do publishing companies even exist?
Where did you get the idea that these were only books that no-one cared about? I re-read the article and didn’t find anything where they specified the type of rare books collected, scanned and destroyed
“Not rarities, but the exact opposite,” the dealer reports: “What specifically was bought were nonfiction titles from 1970 onward with ISBN numbers—dusty, unsold stock that no one had wanted for years. Resale is completely out of the question: The books are worthless, and for each title only exactly one copy was purchased.”
That article still tries to frame this as “Rare antique books are going to be lost forever”.
They have a video in the article showing some books being destroyed (although, granted, dictionaries are not “rare” but I’m sure some rare texts have been destroyed in this process).
And as others have pointed out, they could easily publish the digital copies for other uses as a preservation measure.
The video also was shit, you won’t scan that book when you cut that much off. I bet the video has absolutely nothing to do with it all, as it seems to be not at all recycling, but cutting books. Cutting books needs those expensive machines in the video (you use that when making books), not to pulp stuff.
Any examples of those rare books?
Edit: of course not, what an absolute shit article. “If you don’t dislike trashing a book you’re a bad person!!!” Basically. What an ignorant idea. The article linked in the first “article” (the first contains 0 information) isn’t much better, large companies buy books nobody wants, scans them and discards them.
Guess what librarians worldwide do? Well they don’t scan the books before sending them for recycling.
So an overly emotional trash headline to generate that sweet anger and engagement IMO.
Still plenty to be pissed about though. As someone who does archiving it’s still enraging because they are destroying thousands of books not for archival where you destroy one copy to provide access to all, but to copy the book, rewrite it, and sell it back to you.
There’s now less copies of said book, it wasn’t archived, they stole that content, and are now selling it back to you. People will then take this stolen content and act like it’s something they created and then try to turn profit. It makes every copyright argument the publishers have ever made look like a joke. Why do publishing companies even exist?
Where did you get the idea that these were only books that no-one cared about? I re-read the article and didn’t find anything where they specified the type of rare books collected, scanned and destroyed
The first time I heard about this was from this article: https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher
A translated quote from it:
That article still tries to frame this as “Rare antique books are going to be lost forever”.
Thank you for pulling that up and helping to make it more clear
In the title of this post for starters, but even if it’s true, the post is just ragebait crap.
They have a video in the article showing some books being destroyed (although, granted, dictionaries are not “rare” but I’m sure some rare texts have been destroyed in this process).
And as others have pointed out, they could easily publish the digital copies for other uses as a preservation measure.
The video also was shit, you won’t scan that book when you cut that much off. I bet the video has absolutely nothing to do with it all, as it seems to be not at all recycling, but cutting books. Cutting books needs those expensive machines in the video (you use that when making books), not to pulp stuff.