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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

Yes, how do you think books get digitized?

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

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.

physical books are not scarce. there is no reason to 'innovate' non destructive scanning for digital text uploading, that also costs more. eg imagine anthropic instead spent more money and then had a warehouse of surplus books that it wasn't economical to resell. why would that be better

[carveout for like 15th century rare book originals but that's not what anyone is talking about]

*not especially directed at present parties voice* I just know a lot of woe is going to betide, everyone is misunderestimating the augeries again

Not arguing about the Anthropic story. Just correcting The Fresh Prince‘s assertion that all books are digitized this way.

I didn't say all. The vast majority are and destructive scanning is the standard practice except where the physical book absolutely must be preserved.