Comment by bigbadfeline
7 days ago
Great comment. Those who try to excuse book burning cannot be doing it in good faith, this is the acid test.
If AMZN, et al. were burning books in good faith, they would be open about it, point to the party responsible for it, and provide a list of the burned books to allow the community to organize, scavenge and scan the endangered publications. Keeping everything secret is a proof of maliciousness.
Preserving books and providing easy access to the information in them is of utmost importance, this is certainly understood by the public and private entities who could do something positive about it - their actions in the opposite direction should be a wake up call, they're on the wrong side of this issue.
Libraries I volunteered for would coordinate throwing away books late night under dark right before the dumpster was picked up and emptied.
Because people are irrational when it comes to this topic. They say stuff like “book burning” when they see books being destroyed. Doing it in relative secret kept the crazies away.
If you are passionate about this topic, lobby for more funding to store archives in the public good. Expecting private parties to do it for free because it gives you the ick to see books destroyed is not useful.
More books get destroyed each year during estate cleanouts than any AI companies could ever hope to accomplish. Most books donated to goodwill or other thrift shops go straight to the dumpster and might not even have a set of human eyes put on them at all. These places act as sin eaters for folks to leave their trash with.