This situation has absolutely no relation to that. This is the exact opposite, and the only reason this information isn't available publicly and is in risk of getting lost is copyright law.
TLDR: Amazon isn't the nazis in this story, copyright law is.
In any case, all the indignation about destructive digitization misses the point that rare books takings space in a warehouse for years without being bought will eventually be destroyed anyway.
It'll take a while before publishing collapses due to the availability of the same information via an LLM, but once this happens new books will get a lot more expensive for AI companies and a lot cheaper for everyone else.
My writing got better and better, and I got better publishers who actually hired editors, but the books sold fewer and fewer copies. Even crappy self-serving poorly written stackoverflow posts are often good enough. Then LLMs killed stackoverflow. Is that real ironic or Alanis ironic?
But I'm not holding my breath waiting for a book deal from OpenAI.
I always struggle with their articles because it feels like they built it for rage bait on a topic and leave the other interesting topics out of it. It is an absolute shame for books to be destroyed but what does it really mean to be rare here? I know they kind of tried to differentiate but it sounds like this could be John Doe’s self help book that never sold well. If you ever are connected to a library you will start to realize how many books simply get thrown out or sold for nothing because nobody wants them.
To me the problem is partly the copyright law. I think it’s. Hard problem but I always lean more towards books having short copyright shelf lives and making it legal for digital copies to be shared after which I think would eliminate I good part of this problem. Not to mention 99% of the books published are probably garbage but that is highly subjective.
So it is bit of a meta rant but I think there a couple holes to go down that could be extremely interesting but they always write these informationally light articles. Like scrolling through a NYT visualization for just some shipping datapoints. Don’t really dig deep on anything and then end with a trust me bro these are rare books that Amazon is destroying for AI when I cannot be that upset with the amazons of the world. There are a lot of reasons for a business to digitize books, most books are worthless and it makes sense to cut the bindings for scanning. I would rather talk about how could you fix copyright to make this less an issue but is it even an issue with how many books get thrown out?
Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.
The difference is huge between 404 and Fox. Fox is out here trying to tell people there's a trans agenda, and that Biden was a lunatic leftist. They are just making up stories and publishing them because they know their audience engages. 404 definitely make editorial choices about which stories to pursue but I've largely found them to be grounded in real depictions of stuff that is happening.
These LLM training runs have already ingested essentially the whole public internet. What marginal value is to be gained from scanning and destroying obscure books?
For me the biggest functional issues with LLMs don't seem to have any connection with "I wish they had read this obscure community cookbook from 1946". Is that going to get Claude to stop saying "honestly" to me? Is it going to get LLMs to stop making up sources that don't exist? What is in it for Amazon or any LLM company to chase more obscure data like this.
The closest they got was admitting that the rare books weren’t anything that someone might care about in the sense that people assume when we hear “rare books”
> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
Okay? But then why exactly where they considered valuable enough to warrant an entire article about them going to a book scanning facility? Without revealing anything about these books I have no idea if they were classic literary works that were underappreciated, or if this was some old guide about How to Use Microsoft Office 97.
andsoitis•54m ago
Not even the title of one of those rare books?
ropbear•38m ago
It would seem the redaction of the rare titles is a way to avoid de-anonymization and subsequent harm to the business of the seller who agreed to place a tracker in one of the books. That being said, maybe they could have chosen a better methodology which would have allowed the disclosure of the title, although ultimately I’m not sure the title matters too much outside of their claim they were “rare”.
andsoitis•33m ago
brookst•18m ago
My neighbor self-published a book, printed I think 100 copies at his own expense. It's literally a rare book. I can't imagine he nor anyone would care if an AI company bought a copy, no matter what they did with it.
Maybe these "rare books" are first edition Mark Twains, and. maybe they're unwanted books that would otherwise have gone to be pulped. The distinction is important and by not giving any evidence or even a qualitative claim about the types of books, 404 media is being pretty weak here.
jrimbault•33m ago
andsoitis•26m ago
The rare qualifier is used precisely because no reasonable person thinks this is stealing.
x______________•17m ago
Nothing good comes from hoarding whether it being toilet paper, money or knowledge.
andsoitis•3m ago
No reasonable person thinks buying 1 of something is "hoarding".
throw1234567891•5m ago
plpbs•23m ago