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by qsera 1 day ago
>they're probably quite common titles.

Old books could have been common back in their day, but they might not be very common today.

3 comments

For model train sets, its often the cheapest most common ones that become the most valuable decades later. The expensive sets were cared for and so many survived, but the cheap ones were played with and tossed into the bin and then few survive in good condition. So because something was once common does not mean it can't become rare later on.
That means that they were already getting destroyed somewhat and not being recoverable, even without AIs. If there is just one or very few copies of a book or it ends in a particular buyer, or in warehouse prone to fires, not surviving to floods, rats or whatever.
> That means that they were already getting destroyed somewhat and not being recoverable, even without AIs. If there is just one or very few copies of a book or it ends in a particular buyer, or in warehouse prone to fires, not surviving to floods, rats or whatever.

There's a difference between accidental or negligent destruction, and planned and deliberate destruction.

You're describing the former, but these AI companies are doing the latter.

The books you will find on a bulk sale are, by definition, the ones that are very common today.
Read it again. These aren't books that were bought in bulk bt bookstores.

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.

These articles are designed to create maximal outrage, and they can mislead you into thinking the problem is far worse than it really is. Conflating the nature of the books (between "rare" and "common") is exactly the sort of things these articles do.

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.

>They are making that knowledge more widely available in a digital form.

Where can I access the digital form of the destroyed books? You should know since you made this statement, right?

Reread what he wrote
Yea, and I don't think I missed something. To be clear, I don't want the "knowledge in the book", I want the content of the book itself so that I can form my own knowledge. So don't not want an LLMs regurgitation of the book...

And what about fiction? I don't want an LLM's "interpretation", I want the real thing.

Is that made available somewhere?

>They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning.

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.