Comment by yonran
8 days ago
> Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.
No, destroying collectible books would be a shame, not just any rare worthless books. But these are not collectible. The article tried to dance around it by saying maybe some books have a sentimental value to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean any library or collector wants it. Don’t fall for manufactured outrage!
Edit: Here’s an example of an extremely rare book. My great great grandfather published a book of sermons around 1920. That book has zero value to anyone other than my dad. Would I be outraged if it ended up at someone’s estate sale, then a used bookstore, and then an LLM consumed it to learn to read? No; I would have expected it to have been discarded by humans before the LLM even got to it. Most of what we leave behind is discarded.
This was my issue as well. It seems like they tip toed around it in one paragraph saying usually these are books with isbn numbers so not truly collectible or very rare and then in another paragraph plainly stated that it could be foreign language or low volume books that are rare. Rare expresses a different meaning to me and I think it amounts to exactly what you said, manufactured outrage.
You could donate that to the church archives of his denomination or the religious studies department of a university or at least some sort of local historical society.
I was in charge of a "lending library" ministry at my church for a few years. Let me tell ya.
We got started when another ministry moved out, and sort of from zero. My pastor's clear instructions to me were: make sure everything we carry is doctrinally sound.
So we inherited several full collections of books in rapid succession. Some had even belonged to priests and religious. Those gave me a fascinating time, because I could basically rubber-stamp every title that a priest had in his personal collection. But slowly the balance began to tip into rather esoteric volumes that normal laypeople couldn't really use. Literally books full of sermons and other arcane subjects!
I was tasked with discarding/recycling all the rejects. There were tons of rejects, believe me! So with every session when we had boxes full of donation, it was imperative to cull the bad stuff very fast, shelve the rest, and then find somewhere to dump the trash. The manager was encouraging me to recycle, or at least not tip them all into the Dumpster, but it turned out to be a logistical nightmare to find anyplace that would recycle books like that. Having no vehicle, I had to continually figure out ways to cart around heavy loads, just to get them out of church and into the trash somewhere. That was the worst part of my job.
Now it was clear that books were not a very hip or current medium, but there were plenty of elderly parishioners who did appreciate the resource and did compliment my work, but our church was not free of prejudice or judgementalism, and let me just say, there was an angel or entity whose purpose was only to jumble all the books while I wasn't watching, and leave a deliberately unorganized mess for me to confront every week. This made the task distinctly Sisyphean, in addition to the need to constantly discard rejected books.
I finally threw in the towel when large boxes of Spanish-language books were donated; there was no way at all for me to vouch or determine their orthodoxy, and the shelves were full anyways, and I was just tired of propping up a legacy ministry anyway. But it really drove home my opinions about books, hoarders, and that is why I have no troubles with the way books are currently being treated.
So it turns out your organization didn’t need so many donated books. The ideal outcome for your discards should still be sent somewhere to someone who wants to read or possess them, or barring that, to be scanned so their contents are at least preserved somewhere. It belongs in a library, even if incorporeal.
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We recently had a post highly upvoted here that collected bus tickets from an earlier era. It showed the unique moment in time where such fares were highly detailed, unique pieces of art. Ultimately destined to be single use and largely extremely pedestrian.
We've also seen a website that collects old paper restaurant placemats from across the ages. Literally disposable, zero value items that were made to be discarded by the thousands.
And yet, when someone has an interesting idea that ties them together, makes us recollect or think about our past in some novel way, these useless uncommon things suddenly become quite interesting.
A book on sermons, o its own, from the 1920s is maybe not that interesting. A book of sermons selected from each decade? A collection that compares regional books of sermons? A compare and contrast of the 2020s and 1920s? I can imagine many interesting thesis where a book like that becomes interesting because of the context of other books that are juxtaposed to it.
A book on Detroit motorways and bus schedules from the 30s isn't interesting or valuable on its own. But when you contextualize it, suddenly it might be a way to understand our history, our path through development and redevelopment. Connecting our present moment to the past.
Yes, I collected a couple decades of Muni fast passes too and finally gave them to an artist to destructively turn into some project. I was sad that my “rare” tickets probably won’t be kept forever, but I’m glad that somebody got some use out of it. I feel the same way about LLMs. I’m glad that they are learning from old published materials. In my opinion, 404media is cynically inciting anti-tech anger; they don’t otherwise have any interest in the preservation ecosystem.