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We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
- andsoitis 1mo ago> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked, but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many people speak. Not even the title of one of those rare books?
- ropbear 1mo ago> The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 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 1mo agoThe issue is if rare is simply "not many in circulation", that's very very different from rare being "it is a unique artifact". The former kind of rarity doesn't really present an existential end, whereas the latter does.
- brookst 1mo agoYes this is disingenuous to the extreme. 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.
- gamerdonkey 1mo agoI don't think HN commenters need to be the arbiters of which books are beneficial to society. And beyond just benefit to society, don't forget how subjective the decision about what constitutes a "unique artifact" is. That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother. Not necessarily the ink printed on paper, but the information contained within. The above is based on a true story involving archive.org's Manual Library. The idea that even such esoteric and forgotten information would get hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI and then destroyed in the outside world, such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it, is frankly disgusting.
- Legend2440 1mo ago>That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother. Not necessarily the ink printed on paper, but the information contained within. On the other hand, now that the manual is in the AI, you can just ask the AI how to repair the sewing machine. The information contained within has not been lost, and in fact has become much more accessible.
- JohnFen 1mo ago[dead]
- gamerdonkey 1mo ago> you can just ask the AI how to repair the sewing machine Like so often in its usage, the word "just" is carrying immense weight in this sentence. Please see "hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI [...] such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it" > has become much more accessible This accessibility rests on a number of assumptions, not the least of which is Amazon's (of all companies) charitable good graces in offering access to their AI at an affordable price. It also assumes that the model can accurately regurgitate the text without hallucinating about other, similar machines, and that it can faithfully recreate any diagrams.
- 29d ago
- jrimbault 1mo agoAnd even then, the "rare" qualifier is not needed here. What Amazon/LLM companies are doing is amoral. This is intellectual piracy (not in the "copyright infringement" sense) at the highest level. Stealing and centralizing the accumulation of human knowledge to eventually rob us all and put all power into the hands in the hands of a handful of people, who are not benevolent.
- andsoitis 1mo agoIn what way is this stealing? The rare qualifier is used precisely because no reasonable person thinks this is stealing.
- x______________ 1mo agoHoarding. Nothing good comes from hoarding whether it being toilet paper, money or knowledge.
- throw1234567891 1mo agoMakes you wonder how many packets with rare books.containing airtags said recipient receives. My guess is: one so far.
- gamerdonkey 1mo agoThe warehouse worker getting paid near minimum wage to unpack 100 boxes per hour is probably not taking a ton of time to look for and report AirTags. However, a title can be cross-referenced against purchase histories in probably under a minute.
- plpbs 1mo agoAs I understand it, "rare" in this context could mean anything—even a washing machine manual from the 1980s...
- Finnucane 1mo agoIt doesn't really matter. The article suggests that they are selecting and tracking books by ISBN, which means: books that have been published or at least reprinted in the last 50 years or so. And they are trying to get as much of that set as they can, regardless of quantity, quality, or any other consideration. Which means that older books printed before ISBNs became common may be relatively safe, at least from Amazon. And some books just don't come up on the used market very often. (small historical irony: when Amazon first started selling books, they used the Books in Print database, which included a lot of books not actually in print.)
- koliber 1mo agoI watched Short Circuit yesterday. All I can think now is "need input".
- Havoc 1mo agoBad enough to steal IP but destroying books…that’s just evil
- boxed 1mo agoTo me, the hate against "destroying books" is kinda silly. The reason we're against destroying books is because the Nazis did it to destroy information. 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.
- krunck 1mo agoMaking the verbatim content of the book lost forever is not equivalent to burning them? I'd even wager that the CO2 emissions of the scan,shred, and train process is even higher than burning.
- boxed 1mo ago> Making the verbatim content of the book lost forever is not equivalent to burning them? The verbatim content are the words, not the paper. Books are lost all the time because the last book ended up in a landfill. But if an AI lab digitizes it, now it's stored in an extremely redundant storage lake in a datacenter and the company has huge incentives to make sure they don't ever lose that data.
- zimzam 1mo agoSo is it moral of me to destroy a copy of "Windows 95 for Dummies"? What if a person with small children and an elderly, incontinent pet with a penchant for peeing on books wants to buy it - can I sell this book to such a dangerous purchaser who might destroy it? I love book as much as the next person but the hyperbole about "rare books" is absurd. Nobody is buying the Gutenburg Bible and destroying it for AI. The books in question are certainly not rare enough to be in museums - without titles there's no proof these are anything of real value.
- 1mo ago
- jcarrano 1mo agoAccording to the article, the scanning facility has been there for a while, so it may well be that they have been destructively scanning books for a while, even before AI. It makes sense for the major book retailer to have digital copies of every book so that it can begin selling those as soon as it can negotiate the rights (if there are any). 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.
- fg137 1mo agoI don't understand why Amazon still bothers to blow money on their in-house AI effort (outside AWS Bedrock). What have all the scraping, scanning and training led to? Nobody is using their models.
- fragmede 1mo agoThe dataset is valuable on its own without the model.
- ValentineC 1mo agoComplete stab in the dark: AWS "training as a service" (further split into multiple microservices) for companies looking to train their own models.
- alightsoul 1mo agoAWS has nova and titan models that nobody seems to use
- exolymph 1mo agoI didn't even know AWS had in-house models, that's how seldom they are mentioned.
- fancyfredbot 1mo agoI look forward to the day that AI companies pay large advances for new books. 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.
- Zigurd 1mo agoI've been lead author and co-author on several books on programming. My first book sold tens of thousands of copies even though the writing was not just trash but a crime against humanity against anyone who had to read it. This was back in the day when the source code for the book was provided on request on a floppy, which was actually quite rigid because it was a Mac floppy. 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.
- Aurornis 1mo ago> My first book sold tens of thousands of copies even though the writing was not just trash but a crime against humanity against anyone who had to read it. I’m sure I never read your book, but there is something cathartic about reading an admission like this. I have no doubt people got value out of your books, but I distinctly remember as a kid saving up to buy a couple expensive programming books from the bookstore and then being sorely disappointed in the way they were written. At the time I thought I was too young to understand adult writing, but when I went back to the books later as an adult it was obvious they were just written by amateurs. I still cherished them and learned a lot, but I will always remember the struggle of trying to follow along with what was probably some first-time writer’s attempt to learn how to write as they went along.
- ilamont 1mo ago> But I'm not holding my breath waiting for a book deal from OpenAI. Was this title eligible for class action status in the recent Anthropic scanning case? I know people who popped up on the list decades after writing obscure or forgotten technical titles. The estimated payout is $3k per title, usually split between publisher and author. https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/09/07/the-anthropic-settlement-what-it-is-and-isnt-and-who-could-get-paid/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/09/07/the-anthropic-set...
- infecto 1mo agoDoes anyone else get pretty tired with 404s style of writing? I hate to make this comparison but it feels like a Fox News for the left. 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?
- forestrywat 1mo agoNot really. It's not to my taste, but I've found their journalism to generally be lefty but focused on important events. 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.
- infecto 1mo ago
- tdeck 1mo agoWhy is the textual data bound up in these paper books worth the trouble? 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.
- awakeasleep 1mo agoI'm not an expert in LLM training, but I think we can all agree that the writing on the Internet is generally very low-quality and surface level compared to the depth of books. Most books in the past were even edited by a separate person from the writer!
- tdeck 1mo agoGranted that that is indeed the case, surely the quantity of high-quality writing available online (including things like Project Gutenberg) still dwarfs the quantity remaining in obscure unscanned books.
- rwmj 1mo agoHumans manage to be pretty intelligent with only reading perhaps a few thousand books in their lifetime. It seems unlikely that AGI will appear but only once it has read that last out of print 1983 book on knitting patterns.
- SpicyLemonZest 1mo agoFrontier researchers have found that dumping more and more data into training is effective at improving LLM capabilities. Nobody has a gears-level understanding of how training on some particular kind of data leads to some particular behaviors, so they generally take the attitude that more is better.
- mapmeld 1mo ago
- Aurornis 1mo agoThe length of this article and the unnecessary visualizations felt like a waste after getting to the end and discovering they won’t reveal anything about the books that were scanned. 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. There was a more balanced take on Twitter (which I’m unable to find again, because Twitter) from a book seller who said it was more of the latter type: Books that were rare because they were no longer in demand and most everyone had thrown their copies away. Some parts of the media are doing backflips to try to imply that these are cherished literary classics being fed into the shredder to deprive humanity of something valuable, but the book seller seemed happy to be making sales for useless old books that no human was interested in buying.
- awakeasleep 1mo agoAnyone who is into books eventually finds out that we're permanently losing them all the time. Like they're thrown out, and lost forever. University libraries throwing out huge collections of out-of-print material to make room for new books, study spaces, even cafés. Municipal libraries turning over their collections. Books that never made it to libraries going out of print, tossed in the trash after yard sales. The AI companies digesting this stuff is a net win for humanity. And I'm not a fanboy! Ideally they'd upload them to Anna's archive too, but even if they keep it private forever, at least these books live on in some way in the model weights. Thats better than a landfill.
- alightsoul 1mo agoIf or when they go bankrupt or reach agi, they will just delete them. I hope Anna's archive already has them anyways. Apparently openai's newest unreleased model, gpt 6, is capable of continuous training at Inference time, like a person is. That might be enough to delete them
- faidit 1mo agoHow many AI companies are doing this? Say there are only 5 copies of a book left out there but 100 different companies want to shred it. Rare items could effectively vanish from the market. "Rare" meaning inclusive of high-quality items, disregard the bot opinion that mass book destruction is fine because most books are worthless anyway. And are any safeguards in place to make sure scanned books get saved in their original form for posterity before being recycled into trainingslop? Aside from Google's quasi-legal/ethical mass book scanning operation of course.
- Aurornis 1mo ago> "Rare" meaning inclusive of high-quality items, This is the citation needed that is missing from every report so far, including this one which deliberately refuses to reveal anything about these books. You’d think if there were examples of actually valuable, rare books being shredded that the journalists would at least be able to name one such example. Instead it’s always vague posting about the destruction without ever naming any examples. I think it’s because if they named some example titles, everyone would see that they don’t care about these books being shredded.
- faidit 1mo agoOn the contrary these companies should be publicly listing the name/info of every book they destroy and use as training data. If the books are really worthless as you say then their case would be proved transparently. This article presumably had to maintain confidentiality to protect the seller who agreed to place a tracking device in the shipment. I would say the burden of proof is on the companies destroying human cultural heritage en masse, not the handful of journalists calling for attention to the matter.
- rpdillon 1mo ago> I would say the burden of proof is on the companies destroying human cultural heritage en masse, not the handful of journalists calling for attention to the matter. You're literally assuming the conclusion. The exact topic under contention is whether they are "destroying human cultural heritage".
- ChrisArchitect 1mo agoDiscussions: 2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725 21 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
- im3w1l 1mo agoSomething I've been thinking about is that a physical book is a physical artifact, and it's age and authenticity can be verified by treating it as such. In contrast a digital book has no such marks. It's impossible to tell if it was redacted to hide inconvenient passages, or even completely rewritten or fabricated (which can now easily be done at scale with AI). If the physical book is a primary source then the digital version must be considered a secondary source: A potentially biased retelling. For this reason, a digital book can never be a perfect substitute for the physical book it was created from.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoIt seems like most bookshop owners today are hoarders-turned-entrepreneur. They rent a storefront, adopt 2-5 cats, and they set up shop with their hoard of books so that they can hoard on a commercial level that would never be possible in a private home. It also seems that American society has been swept away by the worship of books, rather than literary appreciation or promotion of education. "Banned Books Week" as the primary exhibit here. A tug-of-war over books that are supposedly "banned" when the verb itself has been twisted beyond recognition. I see posters and television shows and public service announcements that promote "Books!" and "Reading!" for no other purpose. Many books are trash and they will fill your head with garbage as sure as social media can, so why the indiscriminate worship of books? It is conspicuous that, aside from established booksellers, and perhaps the LFL owners, many of the people crying out and moaning over book-destruction seem unwilling or unable to actually take those books in and store them. That is the point, that these books are unworthy of taking up storage space, which is an ongoing cost, and maintenance, and therefore, it is fiscally responsible to sell them, scan them, and destroy them. If you want to dedicate a room full of shelves to books that nobody will ever read, then go ahead and buy out your local bookseller! They will not stop you or cancel your order! Tell them you are saving those innocent books from the Big AI Bugaboo! They'll grovel at your feet! Also now, I'm seeing small booksellers who feel "suspicious" or "skeptical" about large book orders. There was one Down Under who said "oh we got an order for over 70 and we can't physically handle that!" I feel like it's becoming a "shut up and take their money" situation. These booksellers, as professional business owners, should know that they may never liquidate stock, and this is their golden opportunity to simply get rid of some of that excess hoarded inventory. But if you're merely cosplaying as a bookseller, and deep down you're a hoarder and a worshipper of books, you may really be reluctant to do transactions or earn money that sells away your books.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- bhouston 1mo agoGreat article and work to reverse engineer who was mass buying used books.
- GuB-42 1mo ago> 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. So books that would probably have ended up as trash. These AI training facilities are actually doing these book a service. Not only they are probably going to keep the scans safe (for future training), but having the book end up in an AI model may be the only way it is going to have any use at all. Let's say for instance that the book in question is about woodworking, and it is not great, lots of mistakes and inaccuracies, unoriginal content, etc... except for a single thing, maybe a trick for making a certain measurement or something like that. Who would read such a crappy book for this single good trick he doesn't know is there, well, an computer will, computers process terabytes of crap without tiring and complaining, that's what they are for, and with a well designed LLM, that one trick may resurface, waiting for someone to ask about that specific measurement. The problem here is not that rare books end up in AI training facilities, it is that these AI facilities are owned by for-profit companies keeping the data to themselves. These books should go to public libraries instead, for everyone to access, it would be better if these books weren't destroyed in to process too. But the question becomes: why didn't public libraries didn't do that in the fist place? And maybe in a more respectful way. The AI companies would just have had to license the database to libraries, probably simpler and cheaper than having their own scanning facilities. To me, this mess is a failure of the copyright system. One one hand, large scale book digitization projects intended to preserve and make the original text accessible get lawsuits by publishers, while AI training is "fair use". It means we have built a system that encourages destroying rather than preserving these books!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- rpdillon 1mo agoYes, we've inadvertently set up a system of incentives that were designed to preserve information and monetize it. And we've instead set up a set of incentives to make it scarce and destroy it.
- AceyMan 1mo agoWhile we can quibble (and are) over the details of this particular occurrence, I'm beginning to take the opinion that used/rare booksellers need to implement some form of "KYC" to help guard against the epistemic threats posed by this practice.
- ThrowawayR2 1mo agoThe booksellers are probably so ecstatic to get some value out of books otherwise destined for the landfill that they wouldn't lift a finger for "epistemic threats".
- wheatone 1mo agoNothing but a drawing of an alligator eating a book. Where is the article?
- wheatone 1mo agoLink to URL? There is no article at the above link.
- whatever1 1mo agoThis is what the copyright laws dictate no ?
- bena 1mo agoNo. A copy is still a copy even if you destroy the original.
- nkurz 1mo agoUntil about a year ago this would have been a reasonable and respectable argument, but at least in California you are arguing against current legal precedent: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/ANTHROPIC%20fair%20use.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...
- bena 1mo agoThat's a bit of a wild interpretation of copyright law. I mean, Anthropic isn't going to fight it because it lets them do the thing they want to do, so I can see how this never gets beyond the court that allows them to do the thing they want to do. But would this argument would have flown in the past? It wasn't even attempted in Sony v Universal. Or any copyright suit up until this point. That doesn't smell funny to you?
- nkurz 1mo agoSure, it's a bit wild, and no, the same outcome may not have been reached if the case came up earlier. And if it makes it to the Supreme Court, who knows what they will turn it into. The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote the opinion) is probably the smartest district court judge we have when it comes to technology, and one of the people I'd trust most to come up good decision. He's a treasure, and my instinct is that he got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup
- exhumet 1mo agoi would assume that would come into play if they were uploading scans of the books? there must be some gray area where training like this doesnt apply to that. or ya know, just do it and face the consequences later because you already have the data and know that ai obsessed government will just shrug their shoulders.
- VariousPrograms 1mo agoI support physical media and doing whatever you want with said physical media. If you want to overpay for a copy of Sharepoint 2007 For Dummies and destroy it, knock yourself out. Just because media has been printed and is "rare" doesn't mean it has any practical value. You could easily write an article about how Goodwill and the Salvation Army dump millions of "rare" books that no one would ever buy for $0.50. And thrift stores will dump multiple copies of said books. AI companies would only ever need one! The only thing I disagree with is AI companies feeling entitled to freely use every piece of copywritten work without restriction, but that applies just as much to web scraping, pirated books, etc.
- buran77 1mo agoTechCrunch is trying too hard to make a connection in the title there. Amazon was trying to make money then as it is now. Their selling of books at the beginning was no more principled than the destruction of books now. This is the legal loophole that allows them to do what they need to do, and the benefit of doing it outweighs the modicum of outrage this title will generate. Edit. Because I see my statement confused all the HN experts: Anthropic's version of this was Project Panama [1]. The destruction of the original allows them to keep a digital copy in the AI training dataset. Quoting from the page: > Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama
- lelandfe 1mo agoThe worst part of Amazon destroying priceless old books in the quest to build the torment nexus is the hypocrisy
- jambalaya8 1mo agoall due respect but if they buy them they can do whatever they want with them. not like they are people and not like you have a right to them either. not even like you would have been able to acquire them yourself.
- ImPostingOnHN 1mo agoYou're not really responding to the post, which is about the hypocrisy. "They're allowed to be a hypocrite" doesn't mean they aren't a hypocrite.
- jambalaya8 29d agoOkay, let's say some books deserve the equivalent of UNESCO status. How would you, personally, go about this?
- cortesoft 1mo ago
- spogbiper 1mo ago"rare" is used in these headlines/articles to incite and generate clicks
- rohan_ 1mo agoyou do realize "rare books" in this context most likely means random technical manuals nobody cares about and not collectors items, right?
- wahnfrieden 1mo agoIf most but not all, what number are ones that people and collectors do care about?
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoAny bookseller worth their salt will ensure that a truly valuable book will not languish on their shelf for 1 minute longer than it takes to find a buyer willing to pay a fair price. If AI-scanners are somehow bid-sniping bona fide collectors and wealthy aficionados, there may be cause for concern. But that is most certainly not happening here.
- wahnfrieden 1mo agoHow do you have confidence in that? These buyers are reportedly exceptionally non price conscious. Personally when seeking out rare books with few copies in existance and extremely scarce availability, I have often found listings that have lasted for quite some time. Not all rare books go to auction. You might be thinking only of some extreme of notable works and not a wider spectrum of desired but scarce publications that does indeed exist contrary to your confident assertion.
- timmmmmmay 1mo agobecause that ended up being the case the last couple times this topic came up and now we've gotten wolf-cried the part where the article avoids mentioning what book this was is a tell
- cortesoft 1mo agoIf collectors cares about them, the sellers wouldn’t have sold it for pennies.
- zamadatix 1mo agoI'm less concerned with how these rare books didn't rot in large lots of unused books and more concerned with whether or not this helps preserve the content longer.
- wahnfrieden 1mo agoThe content is never made available. It would be illegal to.
- progval 1mo agoIt will be legal to share in some decades. Not that Amazon will bother, though.
- zamadatix 29d agoI don't expect an amazon.com/checkoutrarebooks page but I also don't really think the legality of sharing the content has been much of a concern for these companies either. Ironically, one of the few things Meta got in trouble about with building their AI was helping share the training data.
- nullorempty 1mo agoThe content is preserved obviously, and I hope that sometime in the future it will be made available in its original form. What worries me about the trends is inevitable sanitization of content or straight out falsification.
- nullorempty 1mo ago... because now it can be done at scale.
- Legend2440 1mo ago>What worries me about the trends is inevitable sanitization of content or straight out falsification. That sounds really speculative, and not inevitable at all. I think you're just trying to invent things to be worried about because you don't like AI and don't trust AI companies.
- dr_dshiv 1mo agoThe Embassy of the Free Mind (https://www.embassyofthefreemind.com https://www.embassyofthefreemind.com) is a rare book library in Amsterdam that is scanning books the old fashioned way… leading to https://SourceLibrary.org https://SourceLibrary.org — a collection of over 5,000 books from the renaissance that have never been translated before. Consider donating, if this is a topic you care about!
- jeffbee 1mo agoI remember when hackers believed in the doctrine of first sale. You can do whatever with the stuff you own.
- onion2k 1mo agoIn a strictly libertarian sense, sure. In more liberal sense, because you might be destroying something unique that later generations might actually like to see, the life rule that states "Don't be a dick" probably applies trumps even first sale doctrine.
- jeffbee 1mo agoIf there was a public interest in these books then it was already attached, and it was an outrage for the sellers to exclusively possess these books, and it was an outrage to sell them to any other private party.
- radial_symmetry 1mo agoThey are rare because nobody cares about them otherwise. Why is everyone acting as if they are trashing Gutenberg Bibles or first edition LOTR copies?
- joshstrange 1mo agoI really have trouble getting worked up about this. "Rare books" is thrown around regularly but my gut feeling is that's not the case. These are used (often? always?) books and while I'm sure there is waste, in general they just want 1 of every book. While I wish there was a repository of every book that was already digitized (it pains me this is the best solution), there isn't one and so I think this is not a real problem. It'd be a different story if they had furnaces that ran only on rare books that they had to continually feed books to but that's not what's happening here. And that 1 destroyed copy will "live on" in a way that it otherwise might not.
- nemomarx 1mo agoIt'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something. Proprietary data has a habit of being lost over time though.
- Teever 1mo agoThe problem is that we're ignorant of the true value of objects and we don't know what will be valuable in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest It seems a little short-sighted to destroy an artifact to get the text. Perhaps the genetic material that remains in books from the people who handled them, or the pollen from plants in the environment that the book existed in will have value in the future, but we won't know what we lost because some people foolishly destroyed it in a bizarre quest to make AGI that the creators argue could potentially destroy humanity. The more and more I read about these kinds of people the more I'm starting to realize that they're in the "here for a good time not a long time" group of people and those are the last people you want making long-term decisions.
- MaybiusStrip 1mo agoMillions of books go in the trash every day. Should all private property come with such an asterisk that it ought to be preserved for whatever unlikely contingency you can imagine? I don't know, AI actually seems like a much more worthwhile pursuit.
- Nicook 1mo agoI remember when google was scanning a bunch of rare books, I mean they might still be doing that? Either way, that was cool. I have a few "rare books" and have read many, you'd be suprised at what is publicly available on google books since like ~2010ish.
- jmyeet 1mo agoYears ago I saw an article on this. For Google Books, they had two processes. The first was destructive. This was for mainstream books currently being published so they had no value. It's (I believe) where you cut off the spine and scan the pages. For rarer books, there was a non-destructive process. Basically the book was opened to each page and scanned. This was slower but didn't destroy the book. I don't understand why these companies haven't just licensed the scans Google has already done. Why is each company doing this rather than just scanning the books once and sharing the scans?
- nkurz 1mo ago> I don't understand why these companies haven't just licensed the scans Google has already done. Because for the vast majority of the books, Google doesn't have the legal right to license those scans. It would be legal if the books were out of copyright, but despite the connotation of "rare books" those generally aren't the books we're talking about. Further, in the cases where Google didn't destroy the original of the book they scanned, their scanned copy may be considered infringing under the new standard, so Google doesn't want call undue attention to what they have.
- Nicook 29d agoyeah, I think most of this really stems from people streatching the use of "rare books". The cool rare books google scanned one page at a time were borrowed from a library because they are rare and or valuable and usually old (out of copyright by a long time).
- GuB-42 1mo agoIf I remember correctly, it wasn't a distinction between common and rare books. It was a distinction between library books and others. They partnered with libraries, and obviously, libraries didn't want their books destroyed, so they devised a non-destructive book scanner. Some of the books they scanned were indeed rare, but rare or not, you don't destroy books you borrowed from a library!
- xiphias2 1mo agoThe scariest thing for me about companies not caring even minimally about conservation is that when AI gets more powerful than humanity (which is clearly a when not an if, even if there's a lot of uncertainty and differences in opinion about the time horizon here), I want to hope that AI will care more about conservation of human people. So far from how I see how powerful organizations work, I'm not as certain as I would like to be.
- legitster 1mo ago> AI gets more powerful than humanity (which is clearly a when not an if, even if there's a lot of uncertainty and differences in opinion about the time horizon here) People say this all the time, but so far nothing has convinced me it's true. LLM development has more or less plateaued, and the current boundaries are very real - energy, resources, capital. At this point we're talking about marginal improvements against the same asymptotes of all technological innovations.
- pstuart 1mo agoA couple thoughts: * They're only buying a single copy of that book as they only need one to scan * If the book was public domain (or should be), then there should be an effort to "democratize" that data into a public commons of intellectual property? Would that an enhancement to the Library of Congress or such?
- Applejinx 1mo agoA couple answers… Why do you think for even a moment that they would buy only one copy, rather than every available copy of something rare and difficult to get? Anyone doing this stands to gain from destroying the only copies of something that has scarcity, to stop competitors from ever getting access to it. That's a serious concern. Why would they do that? What is this 'should' to a company that would do this in the first place? Are you not suggesting the opposite of what they aim to produce?
- Legend2440 1mo agoThat seems really speculative. I think you're assuming the maximum possible evil intent for no reason, mostly because you hate AI and anyone involved in it.
- ursuscamp 1mo agoRare as in your grandfather's John Deere manual from 1982, not rare as in a test print run of The Great Gatsby. The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means.
- stuxnet79 1mo ago> The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means. Citations? Also what exactly are these 'normal means'? As a bibliophile who loves scouring used book stores for out-of-print titles this is a topic I'm very interested in.
- BeetleB 1mo ago> Also what exactly are these 'normal means'? Normal means is throwing it in the recycle bin. Especially for stuff like a 1982 John Deere manual. I've never donated an old appliance's manual to the library. Have you? Amongst my friends, I'm one of the rare folks who donates books to the library. Most people just trash them. And I know the library only wants them to try to sell them in their book sales (or online) so they can get money. Almost nothing one donates to a library actually ends up on the library shelves.
- ursuscamp 29d agoHere's EPA data from as recent as 2018: https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/nondurable-goods-product-specific-data https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... EPA estimates that hundreds of thousands of tons of books are landfilled or recycled every year. That's just the United States. It seems likely that the worldwide figure is in the millions of tons.
- atleastoptimal 1mo agoThey are only destroying the books because they are required to by copyright law. They obviously wouldn't do so if they were allowed to merely copy the book and preserve the original.
- criddell 1mo agoIf it was $1 cheaper to destroy the books even if they didn't have to, they probably would. Storing books is expensive and selling it on means it could be picked up and scanned by a competitor.
- huslage 1mo agoThere's no copyright law that requires the owner of a copy of a book to destroy it. What are you talking about?
- nalthis 1mo agoFrom the ruling of Bartz v. Anthropic: “And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.” I’m not a lawyer, so it’s possible I’m missing something. But it seems to me like the ruling here implies fair use only holds so long as no net new copies, digital or otherwise, are created. If that’s the case, then it necessitates the destruction of the original.
- huslage 26d agoThat ruling is questionable at best according to several lawyers that I've spoken to. I hope that one of them will write about it soon.
- pavon 1mo agoNot true. To the extent that it is fair use to digitize a work for various purposes, it is also fair use to keep the original. It is only if they wanted to resell the original that they would have to delete their digitized copy. The reason they are destroying them because removing the binding is the most efficient way to scan them, they have no use for the originals after they have been scanned, and don't want to spend money storing them.
- hinkley 1mo agoAm I too old now, expecting someone to make a Rainbows End reference? Vernor Vinge predicted this 20 years ago. (Also the person who coined Singularity, though Ray Kurzweil really wanted everyone to think it was his idea.)
- matssvensson 29d agoYep, unpleasantly close prediction. Probably shouldn't give them any ideas.
- hinkley 29d agoThat is certainly an interesting case for thinking things but not typing or saying them out loud. Problem is, they all read the same books we do.
- ashT15 1mo agoCarnegie was building libraries and concert halls, Silicon Valley CEOs buy girlfriends with big tits, cheat in computer games and destroy books.
- olalonde 1mo agoThis feels like a manufactured controversy. What difference does it make to me what someone does with a book after they buy it? It's effectively unavailable to me regardless of what they do. If people are really concerned about these "rare" books, they should lobby the copyright owners to release them online or print more copies.
- pohl 1mo agoIf there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
- YetAnotherNick 1mo ago> what do you think will happen? They raise the price and print more copies?
- chomp 1mo agoYou are not understanding how the market works. Rarity and value do not always correlate with demand. Otherwise I have some beanie babies to sell.
- ipsum2 1mo agoI doubt that your beanie babies are very rare.
- ipsum2 1mo agoWhat if the book has been out of print for 50 years? This isn't a contrived scenario, most of the rare books are like this.
- YetAnotherNick 1mo ago> What if the book has been out of print for 50 years? Same answer? They raise the price and print more copies. You can just print even 1 copy, just the cost per print will be higher. In fact publishers getting some profit on the tail end of books is the best thing that could happen to authors and publishing industry.
- t1234s 1mo agoIn the end its not who can train the better model its who owns the better stack of training data. Acquiring old texts then destroying them makes their information proprietary.
- KPGv2 1mo agoMore and more, I am glad that I stopped giving Amazon my (formerly) enormous amount of business.
- KPGv2 1mo ago>It'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something I'm not really aware of many benevolent acts Amazon has taken in the past decade. Are you?
- RobotCaleb 1mo agoSo, if a corporation can suck up entire books to teach their machines how to think using the information from those books, can we (all humans) join a single corporation that provides all books to its employees? Just need one copy of each and we'll make that copy digitally available for our employees so they can learn from and utilize the knowledge from the books. It's not copyright infringement, they're employees.
- tensor 1mo agoAlmost like… a library?
- briandilley 1mo agoSo... do the materials that it is printed on make it rare? Or is it the combination of ideas, paragraphs, and words that comprise the text make it rare and therefore valuable? If they're releasing digital versions of this text, i feel that is better off anyway.
- c0nducktr 1mo agoWell, I hate to be the one to break it to you but they're not releasing digital versions, they're just destroying them.
- wewewedxfgdf 1mo agoThe headline implies at some level that Amazon loves or cares about ..... stuff.
- kmoser 1mo agoI can think of a couple of solutions: 1. Glue a US $1 bill to the spine and take them to court when they destroy it. 2. Send them a license to use the book, with the condition that if they fail to return it within 30 days, they owe $1M. (Hey, if e-books can be licensed, why not physical books?)
- _djo_ 1mo agoWe really need to be thinking about the long-term implications of what Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are doing here. Because it's not just one company doing this, it's dozens if not hundreds of them, all with huge budgets and all competing over the same dwindling supply of older books. What those talking about library disposals and similar measures are missing is the sheer scale that destructive book scanning for AI ingestion is operating with. It's unprecedented. It's not impossible that in a few years the number of older physical books for sale anywhere will plummet to almost nothing and that in many cases that'll include the last copies anywhere of particular titles. Second-hand book stores will close, and a ton of niche knowledge might be lost forever. It'll also all have been done in relative secret, without any transparency or public record kept of what was lost. Worse, it's something that can only be done once. If our societies don't do something about this now there isn't going to be a chance for a do-over. Once a physical book is destroyed it's gone forever, and we'll be lucky if there's a digital copy left. But even then digital copies don't provide the same level of forensic verifiability that physical copies do. Future researchers looking for material that might've been contained in books like these will be out of luck. If our societies do nothing to stop this, we'll all be poorer for it.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260817141552if_/https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260817141552if_/https://www.40...
- protocolture 1mo agoShould have let them torrent. Just another reminder that piracy remains the absolute best archival strategy we have.
- alightsoul 29d agoA lot of the rare books seem to be books that are most relevant to specific professions within specific countries. I would expect university or national libraries in those countries to have copies of those books, but they often do not digitize them because controlled digital lending is seen as a legal grey area at best. So these ai companies are doing digitization for them and not publishing it, duplicating work for these libraries once they do decide to digitize. Many other rare books are just rephrasings of other books on a given topic and this can be done with synthetic data generation now. Same goes for websites Honestly this feels like a US exclusive problem. Like shipping from overseas would be way too expensive for the cheap books they want. The Chinese just use Anna's archive instead
- emptybits 24d ago404media is paywalled for this article now. Here’s Tom’s version: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/secret-tracking-device-placed-in-rare-book-ends-up-in-amazon-processing-facility-destroying-books-to-train-ai-models-is-all-the-vegas-warehouse-does https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...