Humanity hasn't caught up to the reality of the times; we should adjust copyright laws so anything over say 10 years old can be hosted for free on the Internet. We should have colossal databases of music, books, movies, etc. that can be freely traded and downloaded without breaking any laws. Maybe in the past the commerical protection of art and IP was necessary but with the Internet and AI I think we need to, as a species, get over it and focus on information archival and dissemination over protecting income streams.

On the surface it seems bad, although many of these books were probably rotting in place rather than being read. If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.

More troubling to me is the focus on pre-2022 data. This indicates that the companies are seriously worried about model collapse, where the future models become worse becuase they are being fed by generated data instead of real human data.

This is actually my worse case scenario for AI: the models become good enough to disrupt entire industries in the next 10 years, but then stay frozen at that level. Model drift then kicks in because the world will keep changing but the models do not, and in a few decades we actually regress instead of progress becuase they won't be enough skilled humans to drive advances.

When Google scanned its books, it did not destroy any of the books. This was because of the idea of the "cultural object" where the book has value as a physical artifact. The experience of reading a physical book is different than reading an electronic text. There is an argument that reading a book in its original form is better because it is closer to the original experience. This can also be said of records and tapes. The experience is designed to work in the original format. A book is a designed object with cultural significance. The container for the words can be as important as the actual words. There should be clearer distinctions and policies between mass market production where items can be destroyed and there will still be many of them left and unique and original content with limited copies available. This is not hard to do. Not to do it shows carelessness.

There is good discussion on the previous thread from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738

Yes, since we complained about them violating copyright so much, it does not violate copyright if they destroy the original, so they are now destroying the original. We got our demands met.

There are plenty of scanners that do not destroy the book being scanned. Here is one, I am sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LcTZU-HHI

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127284

They should at least give the scanned copies to a non-profit or government entity to preserve and release them when the copyright expires.

It’s true that they’re destroying old books. The claim that they’re destroying rare books seems to be repeated without much in the way of evidence.

I'm not really the most AI-friendly person around but this news cycle is just as equally annoying.

"Rare and out-of-print" is fabricating a lot of aura here. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but I've yet seen evidence that these are culturally significant copies being destroyed for scanning.

From https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

The oldest is from 1999! If that's the best they can actually enumerate to bolster this outrage farming cycle you could just wonder how irrelevant the rest are.

Really, please, kill this news cycle. There's a lot of issues deserving proper attention right now and this one is a straight-up nothingburger.

Forever preserving the content of a rare book by consuming one (1) copy is the kind of thing we should always be doing more of.

Roughly nobody would have had access to that copy. Roughly everyone can now benefit from its content.

Why don't they just put the pdf versions on Internet Archives? Then they would at least be preserved for the future

Who knew Ray Bradbury could be so wrong.

Not all books are sacrosanct. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they are destroying rare and valuable books.

Yay capitalism! Imagine how much value is being created for shareholders by this destruction! Another example of "great work" being done!

Jokes aside, I don't know what I would do in this situation either. Maybe find a way to mark "rare" or "out of print" books and sell/auction the "pages"? Or make the scanned book available via some mechanism?

Nowhere are the supposed rare books listed.

Confuses "(not all that) old books" with "rare books".

Ragebait, nothing more.

Entropy is a thing.

Ancient Rome stopped creating aqueducts because they had all the ones they needed. They failed to pass that knowledge on to the next generation and so they just forgot how to create aqueducts.

Once AI starts making the majority of content, people will simply forget how to make content. Before we know it we're all fat slobs in floating chairs like in Wall-E.

Best case scenario I think is similar to what we see in Ian M. Banks Culture books where the machines basically take care of us out of the goodness of their hearts and we just kinda fuck off into obscurity.

What would happen if we created large volumes of books with AI but faked their dates before 2022 to induce model collapse?

As long as economics incentivizes next quarter thinking nothing will be done. We can't even handle human portion of global warming which is arguably more important than just some AI model collapse scenario.

> If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.

They aren't. Point me to the links to the digital versions of the originals.

On the contrary, they're mangling the originals: "Character.ai, for example, offers a Books feature that permits users to rewrite public domain works such as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Frankenstein” by changing endings, settings, and inserting themselves into the narrative."

Anthropic: "We use a ‘soft codename’ for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this." If destroying old books were a public service, Anthropic wouldn't need to hide it.

Yeah, I really don't know where this goes from here. Like certain sources, particular Reddit and Twitter, have to largely be considered spoiled at this point. It's hard to quanitfy the amount of bots but my intuition tells me it's really high.

But changing how non-AI people write, that's an interesting angle. Because where do we go from here? In 100 years will we still be overvaluing pre-AI sources? That doesn't make sense. Of course a lot can (and will) change in 100 years.

But i'm reminded of pre-atomic steel, which is steel made before the first atomic bombs were detonated and thus have really low background radiation. This is necessary for making MRIs and such. People will go and find it from shipwrecks and such (ironically, many of which are from WW2). It's also a finite resource. What happens when we run out?

Now pre-2022 texts aren't consumed (other than destructively scanning books of course) but it is also finite. We can't make more of it.