Post

New: Unsealed court docs detail Big Tech’s yearslong, secret race to ingest the collective works of humanity, including Anthropic’s project to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” Gift link: wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books to oversee its secret "Project Panama," new court docs show — quietly buying millions of used books in bulk, breaking their spines and scanning them to feed into its Claude chatbot. wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

It is absolutely possible to digitize a book without destroying it. @archive.org does not destroy the books it images.

I mean the point isn't *the physical media,* unless you're talking about a rare book. If there are many copies, each one doesn't matter. This sounds like fetishism, like you care about "books" because they are paper, but not about the information they convey

that's not true though? archive.org will very often destructively scan things, especially when they are building the OCR friendly edition for screen readers and they absolutely need the higher quality scans. they stream it, it's fun background noise

It's possible, but slower, less accurate, more expensive, and only really useful for rare books where the physical item should be preserved. It's not necessary for every mass market paperback copy languishing in warehouses for years on end.

This a much more measured and accurate post than your previous one. Digitization is many things, and IA has shown how to do it at scale without distraction. In fact, Better World Books, who supplied many of the books to the Panama Project is supplied by books scanned at IA.