This came in my mailbox today. If you sell any collectible books you may end up with them being destroyed by Amazon and other AI operations.
From 404 Media –
“We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.”
To be fair, this is NOT JUST AMAZON doing this. All of them are.
Very true. I just posted this on the NSFE. Let’s see how long before it gets removed for being ‘inappropriate’!
Every week or 2, i see more articles about this.
I didn’t want to sign up for a free account or more spam, so I do not know how upset to be.
There are a great many more rare books than there are popular books, and many are only preserved because some of us have a reverence for books which is based on beliefs, not any meaningful criteria. I consider the fact that I make this statement to be a loss of religious zeal on my part.
I’ve been considering posting about my newly-surfaced feelings on these sales as more information arises about the final outcome for the books. Just wondered if any others were having second thoughts…of sorts.
I’m really torn. The extra sales have been nice, but when I consider some of the fine books I’ve let go of, it does pain me to think of them being “butchered.” I’ve seen the videos and it makes me flinch - as if it were a living thing.
It never occurred to me that Amazon might be involved…I guess it makes sense, though.
Slightly off topic, but supposedly a PBS station’s entire 70 year catalog of programming now only exists digitally, and the cloud service they used went out of business.
They would have to be totally irresponsible to not have a physical media backup of the data.
Even with the current memory prices surge, storage is well below historical price levels.
Even more off topic…
Kinda like Verizon telling us we will lose our landlines in a couple months.
An always-available, top-quality, never-down, means of communication being replaced by something made of “air” that may or may not work in all areas or conditions.
So comforting to someone trying to reach 911 in an emergency.
OK, back to the AI stuff. I find myself hoping that there is some counter-group out there, organizing as we speak, that is looking to purchase all the wonderful, rare books in order to save them from the slaughter.
The thing is, even if someone were to magically pick every single book they wanted to skin, gut, scan, and destroy(*), picking one (or more) copies of it to hoard away from the content aggregator dragons won’t actually stop them from finding other copies and doing it. Then you’ve got the zoo-libraries where the rescued books are going to live - do you just keep them and not sell them, hoping the aggregator dragons aren’t going to get them? Do you offer them to collectors with the interest and hope they don’t sell? Do they just sit on your shelves in, hopefully, good enough condition that they’re not moldering and useless anyway, even if interested parties could get to them?
(*) apparently there was a court ruling that digitizing it was fine as long as they destroyed the orignal copies or something. It appalls me on top of what they’re doing as far as destructive scanning.
All of this is said as a bibliophile. I’m also, er, hard on my books, historically. Not like, purposefully abusive outside of a few cases where spite got involved. I love books. I respect books. I’m also not out here collecting the rare ones and then using them as furniture levels or anything. I buy normal, in-print books from bookstores and appreciate mass market paperbacks for what they are.
I’m also aware there’s probably a more nuanced version of this going on in the bookseller portion of the forum that I’m nosy about. Alas, I do not sell books and can’t vet my way in.
I sold a lot of books to the aggregators, but none of them were rare or irreplacable. AI purchases were a nice boost to my business during this past year.
I use AI to answer questions sometimes, and it has been incredibly useful with sorting out medical issues.
Pretty much my thoughts exactly.
I think a lot of the concern and anger from the public/media is misplaced or ill-informed without knowing exactly what is being purchased and knowing generally the lifecycle of books (most of which are normally destroyed anyway, regardless of AI’s existence). I see both counts as utterly harmless to the long-term legacy of our book heritage (books as objects of value and shared knowledge), but concerning to the strengthening of AI generally as a technology with next to zero guard rails, not to mention writers’ IP objections.
No one is crying from the rooftops over the slash and burn weeding that’s been going on in higher ed libraries for over a decade now, all to increase group and individual study areas among other questionable justifications. Pallet loads by the dozens every few months in many libraries. And most weeded copies are only opened once in their lifetimes to insert the library stamps and stickers.
Most public libraries now share one single copy of an academic text between a dozen different entities.
This reality is more harmful, imo, to long-term academic health and research needs than anything the AI industry is doing to books.
I have an app that tells me if the NYPL, my local library system, owns a book as I offer it for sale. I often sell books the NYPL does not own, which I think is a bit sad, but i know if I donated such a book, they would put it on their free shelf, or just discard it.
Does anyone remember Ray Bradbury’s ominous prediction about the fate of books in his 1953 book Fahrenheit 451?
Marilyn
I have several legitimately “rare” books for sale; none have been bought by the AI people.
The thing to remember is that “rare” does not mean “desirable”. I have one that is a print run of 200; I’ve had it for about 10 years; I really don’t think that it would be a terrible thing if it went away.
In a cleanout today, we got a set of books (I think about 10-12 volumes) from 1896. Once I pull them out of the van, I’ll remove whatever covers have not already fallen off and put them in the recycle bin; the information is easily replaceable, and a book that is falling apart is almost never anything anyone wants (yes, there are exceptions).
A lot of books have out-lived the life that they deserved. In some cases, that’s true even when they’re still on the shelf at B&N. 
Just keep in mind, it’s not just the destruction of the books. Remember what these books are being used for. Any book you wouldn’t mind disappearing from history is probably not one you want an AI being trained on either.
The circulating department of NYPL has continually disposed of many thousands of books. The absence of some books is deliberate.
When I worked for NYPL, it was illegal to do other than dispose of circulating books.
My later to be wife was volunteering with a childhood literacy program and I liberated hundreds of children’s picture books which were among the thousands of books waiting for the sanitation department to pickup for use in that program. They trucked all discards in the system to 42nd street for sanitation department pickup.
The reference division had no such prohibition. It sold books to employees from a small area in the stacks several days per week. The prices were pennies, but at that time they were paying me the minimum wage $1.25/hr.
As long as it doesn’t, you know, make up the answers. Which it will. And won’t tell you it did.
And even real medical pros will miss and misdiagnose things. I have a niece who was having migraines. She is a surgical nurse and didn’t think it was a concern (other than her headaches!)
They finally did an MRI and she ended up in surgery to have a tumor the size of an avocado removed. They THINK they got everything but have to wait for the lab results to come back.
They all PRACTICE medicine. My hope is that AI can put two and two together and find links and causes that people have missed. There have already been situations where that has happened. Computing power keeps going while researchers need stuff like sleep…