We throw away nearly a billion books every year. They're not sacred, and scanning a few million isn't a tragedy. People just don't like AI and want to be outraged about it.
Old books could have been common back in their day, but they might not be very common today.
They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning.
The analogy is imagine someone buying near-extinct animals from any source in bulk, not kittens from average pet shops.
Also, the companies are required to do this by the government/law, they are not doing this because they want to destroy old knowledge. They are making that knowledge more widely available in a digital form.
Nope! Actually this article has a list of the books they were scanning:
https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phis...
>provided Fortune with the email and subsequent spreadsheet containing 3,001 titles, mostly published between 2020 and 2021 by academic publishers like Emerald Publishing, Elsevier, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press, and ranging from business and education to engineering, public policy and medicine.
So not rare, mostly recent textbooks. The headline of this article is a lie designed to outrage you.
But still, the number of duplicates will be inversely proportational to the rarity of the book. Lots of copies of James Patterson and Twilight, probably few or zero rare 16th-century manuscripts.
ars from a month ago is a bit less emotional about it:
"The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers"
but also brings up a reasonable point that there are good ways to do this type of scanning non-destructively.
It's not because they hate books or something. It's literally to stay in the law due to the legal rulings surrounding AI companies and copyright.
If they had the option of not destroying the books without any risk of further lawsuit, they would. They aren't like some crazy people that just want to destroy books.
i am aware. i am saying that there are options to _intentionally_ be non-destructive.
>They aren't like some crazy people that just want to destroy books.
i didnt say or imply they were
they weighed the risk and made a decision. my comment was not calling them "crazy people" for making that decision. i thought my comment was pretty neutral.
Yes, techniques exist, but they are not "reasonable" here, because for these books the risk/penalties of copyright law require them to be destroyed after the scan anyway.
The non-destructive scanning (if you follow the ArsTechnica links) was done for different books with a different legal situation so that they could be preserved.
they weren't shy about pirating content before, and i think there is a decent legal argument they could have made. non-destructive scanning is also probably more expensive. so they made a business decision based on risk (and i would assume cost).
i dont think that makes them "crazy people"
And if their inherent value was so great, regardless of supply or use, wouldn't we be able to churn out infinite value by just printing enormous nunbers of copies and storing them?
This absurd consequence shows the outrage here is without rational foundation. It's feelings run amok. Feels are not a good way to think, people.
Similarly, wholesale used books are cheap because they are extremely common and not scarce.
I'm kind of surprised we aren't hearing that as an argument against burning fossil fuels, actually.
Because the consumers are stupid and think being "new" is worth a lot more, for some reason, when it comes to art/literature/movies. So they are willing to pay more for new stuff that could be mediocre.
I would really pay 10 times the price of some old books, but consumer demand is nearly zero because they are old, so they have gone out of print...
What you are describing derisively as "feels" is actually nuance the very essence of intelligence is not reducing complexity to tapioca.
Destroying the last copy of a rare book reduces the sum total of human knowledge even if its not one already of note.
Historically current thinking isn't the best and most accurate judgement of value. We cherish many works that were not notable upon publication or even in the author's lifetime.
Previously the works were distributed and hard to lose all at once now they are possibly inaccurately scanned and even that slightly lossy data may disappear all at once in a wave bankruptcy especially if the economy crashes again as seems to happen every 10 to 20 years.
I suggest you ruminate instead of patting yourself on the back
Please, give me one example of an interesting and unique book that the AI companies have destroyed.
Not sure if that was a whoosh?
£5 .. don't think it's destroyed .. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Learning-Python-Mark-Lutz-OReilly...
Even if the person running the scanner treated every book with utmost love, museum-level care, and holy sanctity... copyright law would still require them to shred/burn the pristine antique book at the end anyway, or else they get sued for bazillions by the modern companies that "own" the book's contents.
Some legislation got pushed through in some jurisdictions to allow them to claim things were "orphaned works".
"Non-commercial" use can relate to one particular aspect of fair use, but there definitely is no blanket "you can copy work for non-commercial use" proviso in copyright law.
It fell off the front page but here's a relevant story from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123300
In UK there's no non-commercial use exception at all.
In USA it can fall under Fair Use, commercial nature is not the sole measure though.
Non-commercial use is not allowed in Brazil. But Brazil does have some fair use exceptions (like most countries that signed the international agreement on intellectual property).
In Brazil it's illegal for me to make copies of a book and distribute it for free on the streets, for example. It's 100% non-commercial, but still illegal.
These are books that were sitting in some warehouse waiting to be destroyed until it was discovered that AI companies would buy them in bulk. Most of these books are 'rare' because no one bought them, so they didn't print many, and the ones they did print weren't sold so they sat in a warehouse.
I feel like people are imagining some rare, handwritten book transcribed by some 17th century monk. That is not what these are, they are part of the millions of published books that never get any traction, are barely sold, and then are destined to fade into obscurity as they are eventually cycled out of the warehouse and into the incinerator.
But now that AI companies want to add a 'scan them first' step before destroying them, they are suddenly precious and must be preserved?
it is very common to break the back bones of books for mass scanning, I use one at home, I find old books offline, usually people try to donate them to the library but i buy it from them for scanning. It's the only way to economically and fast, there's no good solution beside cutting the spine and feed them into my scanner.