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by tpoacher 1 day ago
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.
2 comments
dekhn 1 day ago
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.

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qsera 21 hours ago
>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?

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WithinReason 21 hours ago
Reread what he wrote
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qsera 20 hours ago
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?

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dekhn 12 hours ago
You are not being prevented from accessing another copy of the book to get that knowledge.
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Legend2440 1 day ago
>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.

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