Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
Sorry, but I did an oopsie. I watched the video linked, they destroy the books to scan them. It’s really sad. Though I’m sure they would destroy them anyway.
They take apart the books to scan them. There’s no scanner in the world that deliberately destroys the paper it’s scanning. They pulp them because that’s more advantageous to them than reselling or archiving the disassembled pages.
I assumed the process destroyed the book but keeping the contents from the competitors would definitely be seen as a business goal.