This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I assume "destructively scan" means to cut the spine off so they lie flat, and that one copy of each book will be scanned? Isn't that a pretty normal way of doing it in cases where the prints aren't rare?
Probably, yes. I think there's a copyright reason behind destroying the book?
Not copyright, as much as if the book isn't precious, it's easier to do that, feed the loose pages into the scanner, and then get an intact one if you want it, compared to the additional expense of having to build and program a machine to carefully turn the pages and photograph what's inside, or the time it would need by comparison.
Or throw the book into a shredder connected to a scanner that combines the page puzzle internally.
It's not secret, it was their defence when they got sued for copyright infringement. Instead of download all the books from Anna's archive like meta, they buy a copy, cut the binding, scan it, then destroy it. "We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it's not piracy"
“We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it’s not piracy”
That is an accurate view of how the court cases have ruled.
Downloading books without paying is illegal copyright infringement.
Using the data from the books to train an AI model is 'sufficiently transformative' and so falls under fair use exemptions for copyright protections.
we bought a copy for personao use, then use the content for profit, it's not privacy
So if I buy a song for personal use, then play that song all day in my club to thousands of people, it's not piracy, is what you're saying?
Because anthropic is full of shit and some weird ass mental gymnastics doesn't change anything
After this debacle, nobody can ever again shame me for piracy, let alone punish me for it
C'mon now. You're not nearly rich or influential enough to get away with that and you know it. Rules are for regular people, not the rich or mighty. Sheesh.
/s
Oh I know, but that why I'm getting more and more "Fuck the rules, fuck your laws, until they're the same for everybody"
Is this an opportunity to self-publish my own book for $100k per copy and be guaranteed one sale?
No they will simply steal it, like they usually do.
How about 5000 $200 books written by their own AI (preferably for free, cheapest printing in existence) ?
Just don't write it in any OS that backs up your stuff to their cloud...you know...for safe keeping...
The fact that they destroyed the books is the most reprehensible thing to me. They could have resold or donated those books to libraries. Instead, they chose the ugliest and most wasteful thing they could possibly do. Despicable.
99.99999% of the time libraries don't want donated books. Honestly don't know if they ever want them (outside of genuinely rare/interesting ones, and even then). Their collections are usually meticulously curated and are basically the children of whomever is currently responsible for them. Libraries throw away books at a prodigious rate as they wear, or their circulation numbers drop, or because they just run out of space.
Honestly I have no real issue with people destroying (most) books. It's 2026 we have access to printers and presses, we can literally make more books on demand, and again for the V A S T majority of books that's more than good enough (again, not counting anything rare/valuable/interesting but also at that point they kinda cease to become just "books" as the value is more tied than the object itself than the text within)
What I have a massive issue with is them hoarding this information, and/or very, VERY, likely breaking any licensing the book may be under. And on top of that seemingly doing a fucking horrible job at actually creating something worthwhile from this massive waste of man-hours and resources.
Article is not available without registering. As for the title, "destructive" book scanning means you cut off the binding and put the pages in a scanner which easily flips through them and takes the pictures. If you're not scanning rare old books, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do it, because setting up a scanner for a normal book and manually turning each page to scan it takes a long time (Internet Archive has videos on how they do it, very nice and impressive, and logical since their original mission was scanning old public domain stuff, i.e. published before 1930 or so). If Anthropic will actually legally buy all those thousands upon thousands of books, that will be a pleasant precedent for an AI company.
Although I very much doubt that random uncritically gathered textual material can "teach their AI tool how to write well". They're still pushing for more and more training data, even though it's clear actual advancement will have to happen (if it can happen) through more refined usage of / training on the data.
Honestly, having ALL media available in digital format, free for everyday people to use, should be a thing. Anthropic, however, ain't that.
My money is on Anna's Archive or a descendant being a preserver of civilization.
Unfortunately, copyright is purposefully designed so that most works going into the public domain are irrelevant by then and nobody's willing to convert them.
People who are okay with this are absolutely disgusting. Some shitty AI company wastes a fuckton of our collective resources resources to build and run their AI data centers, and if that wasn't bad enough they generate a fuckton of unnecessary waste to train the goddamn thing. Fuck capitalism.
They make everything more expensive. Power, water, ram, storage, and now the used book market will shoot up in cost as millions of books are shredded.
When a bookstore goes out of business or just can't sell a book, they don't return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
Yeah that's exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They're taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don't they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I'm as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don't have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
They also initially took content from libgen, which is a fair bit less legal. Personally, I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don't like some shitty for-profit AI company making money from the collective works of civilisation. On the other hand, I think copyright protects works for far too long anyway and most should be in the commons already. Mind you, I would be more sympathetic if Anthropic et al. were doing all this for research purposes instead of capitalism. Maybe that would be a better copyright reform, in that it expires much more quickly than the current laws (say 10 years) but restricts third parties making a profit for a longer period. Likely that would be complex to design and enforce, however.
They don't need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn't make it okay.
Words and ideas don't become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.
Write a book where the spine is a required piece of the story for its understanding or completion.
Kind of like how House of Leaves is best enjoyed with the actual book.
I read one once where being able to slightly see through the pages was a key part of the plot
Which one, if you can recall? I love interactive books.
It was called 世界でいちばん透きとおった物語 by Hikaru Sugi, but I don’t think there’s an English translation because this kind of gimmick works a lot better in scripts where all characters are the same size, and a translation that ends up with a comparable arrangement of those letters would be a major pain too.
A slow-burn read by learning Japanese first. This one will take me while.
I swore I wouldn't buy another physical book, but I may break it just to be able to read this one.
I love reading actual books. I don't know why you would quit if you can afford it
I recently had to move with my physical book collection and swore I wouldn't do it again. I converted it all to ebook now. I'm down to about a dozen physical books, not counting comics and TPBs.
We're progressing backwards to Victorian times where books are luxury items.
I have to say, there are some advantages to using an light e-ink reader vs a massive book (reading Sanderson hardcovers in bed is basically planking but on your back).
The Bookseller.com makes it hard for me to empathize when I need to “Register to read for free”.
I’m tired of having to surrender my time, effort and personal information to read someone else’s propagandas. If you want me to read your propaganda, you can at least pay for it.
Reminder, this includes "Morning Glory Milking Farm" and similar books.
I'm sure that will destroy any intelligence.
Well, at least now there is a LLM that can hallucinate based on the contents of all those books.
All of this, so some hustlebro can make his own AI slop blog polluting the internet, so instead of the actual information, you get an AI hallucinated one from googling.
“…plans in early 2024 to scan “all the books in the world” to teach their AI tool “how to write well”.“ — That’s like teaching a writing course by only reading.
When Kojima scans feet, he does not destroy them.
AI is not my thing. I don't really appreciate these companies scanning everything under the sun, but this is a case where Google did it better. They used a custom scanner that didn't require books to be destroyed in order to scan.
What are they? The giant brains from Futurama? Are they building an infosphere?
