Comment by _djo_

We really need to be thinking about the long-term implications of what Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are doing here.

Because it's not just one company doing this, it's dozens if not hundreds of them, all with huge budgets and all competing over the same dwindling supply of older books. What those talking about library disposals and similar measures are missing is the sheer scale that destructive book scanning for AI ingestion is operating with. It's unprecedented.

It's not impossible that in a few years the number of older physical books for sale anywhere will plummet to almost nothing and that in many cases that'll include the last copies anywhere of particular titles. Second-hand book stores will close, and a ton of niche knowledge might be lost forever. It'll also all have been done in relative secret, without any transparency or public record kept of what was lost.

Worse, it's something that can only be done once. If our societies don't do something about this now there isn't going to be a chance for a do-over. Once a physical book is destroyed it's gone forever, and we'll be lucky if there's a digital copy left. But even then digital copies don't provide the same level of forensic verifiability that physical copies do. Future researchers looking for material that might've been contained in books like these will be out of luck.

If our societies do nothing to stop this, we'll all be poorer for it.