alt Hacker NewsThis mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.
Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.
Replies
If the book really is difficult to come by I don't know that I'd prefer it to only survive as a statistical approximation that can be mostly retrieved if you utter the correct incantation. The AI trainers don't care about the book. It's just a commodified stream of words.
They won’t share it.
And I bet it’s more likely that in 100 years you can read a book printed nowadays than you can read data digitized nowadays.
Except we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world.
Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.
Ok, but that's not what's happening. They are destroying the copies and not making them available to be shared. They are using them to increase the value of their business.
There's a bit of history to destroying books. So yes, anathema.