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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

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.

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.

So copyright infringement.

No. Buying an item, making a copy of it, and destroying the original is legal. Where are you seeing copyright infringement?

Not if that copy is being used for commercial purposes. I can’t buy a copy of music, make copies, and profit from them. That’s theft.

Anthropic's project to "destructively scan all the books in the world" was actually viewed as the *more* ethical and legally sound approach to training its AI. Previously the industry standard had been simply to pirate vast "shadow libraries" of digitized books for free online. wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Yep. The world just has more books than it can use. Once I learned that libraries regularly burned books just for inventory reasons, I stopped caring about anyone else burning them for non-ideological reasons.

yeah, it's so funny that 'breaking spines' is specifically intended as some sort of visceral reaction or something it's a book? it's a bunch of paper bound together with glue? they are inherently mass-produced objects? these aren't some rare one-of-a-kind first editions or something, it's fine