Comment by _m_p
5 hours ago
Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding":
https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...
5 hours ago
Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding":
https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...
This is a bizarre comparison.
Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way.
What similarities do you see here?
People are very desperate to try to claim that something that's somewhat obviously morally wrong is actually highly nuanced, because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
No, we're just telling you your moral intuition is absurd.
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People are very desperate to try to claim that something that's highly nuanced is actually obviously morally wrong, because it makes them feel self-satisfied.
I would disagree on the "obviously morally wrong". What's the alternative for the books if they were "saved" from the fate of being scanned and shredded? How many rare books have you personally brought in the last year? Not everything that's ever created needs to be preserved forever.
Libraries are not archives, and weeding does not mean destruction.
Libraries in my area dispose of 'weeded' books by covert means, so that public ire isn't aroused by finding dumpsters full of discarded books.
They are most assuredly destroyed.
This is really dishonest framing, unless you really, honestly can't tell a difference between pulping a mass market paperback romance novel that there's 3 million of in circulation, and shredding an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.
You call of dishonest framing, but you're begging the question twice.
Once that AI companies are really shredding 200 year old rare books, and once that libraries are only weeding mass market pulp fiction.
That is literally what this article is about.
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