TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
Unfortunately it’s a lot easier and quicker to scan a book if you remove the spine, since it’s then just a bunch of pages that can be fed through an auto feeder. Proper book scanners that turn pages are slow and expensive.
I don’t like the idea of destroying books, but it’s certainly a lot less unsavoury to destroy a single copy to create a publicly available archive.
Not all, in fact probably the minority, of rare books have anything special about their binding. There’s one reference book I’ve been looking for a copy of that was only published 20 years ago in paperback, but copies regularly sell for £150+ on ebay.
don’t destroy books; repurpose them for crafts.