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.
And don’t destroy the physical copies?!
The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.
And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.
I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.
You are correct.
Just want to add one thing, there MUCH easier ways now than those kind of setups. Its just not as cheap/accessible. I worked at a library and there is specific setups for certain kinds of books you cannot reproduce and still need to get a good scan in.
Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.
They also exist with a vacuum puller that goes page by page, using a vacuum strip to hold the page tight to a scanner bar as it pulls upwards. Its just slower is all.
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.
ooh reminds me it’s time to reup my donation for the month
