Comment by pohl
7 days ago
If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
7 days ago
If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
This is a problem whether it's AI companies buying them or three random dudes. The real solution is to get the copyright owners to keep distributing copies, or to change copyright law.
The three random dudes will probably not destroy them, quite a significant difference.
If that would be the case, how come only 3 copies are left?
Not only that, but some random dudes scan the books and put them in shadow libraries.
If there are only 3 copies, then each copy is going to cost thousands of dollars.
Sample:
> Thou shalt commit adultery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
I think the term "rare" might be a bit loaded. DOES it mean "only a handful in existence" or more like "1000 copies?" And at any rate, at least by scanning the book they're theoretically making its contents available to the public. What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf?
"Only a handful" is a precious or extremely rare book. 1000 copies of a book total would certainly qualify it as rare. That's not a lot of copies.
> What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf?
Not destroying them. By continuing to exist, it keeps the possibility that the books will eventually go to someone else. Maybe even a library that specializes in rare books.
> By continuing to exist, it keeps the possibility that the books will eventually go to someone else.
Good news, there's hundreds or thousands of copies that continue to exist. Anthropic, Google et al only need a single copy.
And shockingly, for all this talk of rare books, we don't see the other owners of said books stepping up and offering to have these books scanned non-destructively. I won't hold my breath for them to do so in the short or long term.
FURTHERMORE, the books aren't being scanned for no reason, they become part of new model training data. Meaning that whatever insights these books contain might be available to users in the future. Again, more valuable than all the copies rotting away on someone's bookshelf that might be scanned and made available some day.
1 reply →
I care a lot about the high-illustration picture books of the 80s. Since they have ISBNs, they're presumably on the list. Does the LLM ingest the artwork? Even when it comes to text-only novels, it isn't making the experience of reading the book available.
> what do you think will happen?
They raise the price and print more copies?
> They raise the price and print more copies?
How? Like, do you think a book published 100 years ago has a digital file sitting around a publishing house that might even exist anymore? Re-publishig of old books are often based on scans (the originals were literally pressed into paper by metal, not printed off hard drives), and if the books don't exist, they can't re-scan.
I own some antique Japanese books that have very few copies in existence. You couldn't get them re-printed if you want to if the physical book didn't exist anymore. For a few books, I've actually purchased incredibly high-quality scans that cost me hundreds of dollars because to produce the re-issues, people had to go to museums with high-powered cameras to photograph the pages under supervision of a curator. There's no digital file to print from the publisher. If those books were gone, there's no bringing them back.
You are not understanding how the market works. Rarity and value do not always correlate with demand. Otherwise I have some beanie babies to sell.
I doubt that your beanie babies are very rare.
What if the book has been out of print for 50 years? This isn't a contrived scenario, most of the rare books are like this.
> What if the book has been out of print for 50 years?
Same answer? They raise the price and print more copies.
You can just print even 1 copy, just the cost per print will be higher.
In fact publishers getting some profit on the tail end of books is the best thing that could happen to authors and publishing industry.
6 replies →