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- Hacker News
- When I hear these stories of AI companies buying all the books, I think back to Kevin Kelly in 2008 or 2009. He talked about how books are less expensive than at any other time in history and easier to buy and that could change so it makes sense to buy a lot of books.
> [...] I was near to the point of actually digitizing and getting rid of all my paper books.
> I was that close about five years ago, but then I had an epiphany. I went to private library, and I realized that books were never as cheap as they are today. They never will be as cheap, and that there's some power about having these things in paper always available, no batteries, never obsolete, and that if you made a library now, you would never be able to make some of these libraries in 50 years, so I decided to keep and to cultivate this paper library as something that was going to be powerful in the future.
I remember seeing photos of his library but can't find them anymore. This is the only thing I could find:
by criddell - Related:
AI companies are shredding rare books
- I didn't think about this happening. It reminds me of the cross-border challenges with crypto. Each country has laws to control its author rights or money supply, but those are hard to enforce in the international setup.by lluisantoni
- An instant and obvious good these companies could do is to digitize these books ala google books.by jvanderbot
- Then they would have to deal with copyright. AI is the washing machine that leaves everything spotless.
- Preservation rather than ingesting them into the gaping maw of an Intelligence Engine that preserves the soul of the book in crystalized neural network form? That would be a copyright violation.by mapt
- And get sued even harder by publishers?
Publishing any out-of-copyright books would be awesome thing to do. But it seems none of the books in this order would fall under that, and it's unclear how many old books they are actually ingesting. Current reports are mostly talking about relatively recent books
by wongarsu - I wish we had competent regulators. Force the scans to be purchased through an official repository. Save the scans and sell them to other companies who also want to train models. Force the companies to make all book requests through the official repository. Give some portion of money paid back to the publishers. This is a solvable problem.
- In the case of English-language books, they’re just working to legitimize the stuff they already obtained via, um, dubious methods.
Public domain books - no need to bother, they’ve scraped PG and any other source and can do with it what they like.
Used booksellers should raise the price of used books that are of no interest to any real reader.
- This is a good thing to a point, right? They sell heaps of stock, some old / outdated stock (like "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" as per the article), in bulk, at full price, no questions asked. Retailer's dreams come true.
(I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)
by Cthulhu_ - It's great for the retailer, although I think that example was picked out because it's an extreme example of a book that'll never sell. But the volume of these orders shows another way the AI companies are pissing away their investors' money.by abanana
- As long as the AI devouring a book isn't making it harder for a person to get access to a copy of the book. There might not be many copies of some out-of-print books.by femto
- Two American self published nonfiction authors I know reported large purchases of new books earlier this year, more than 50 units at a time, via Amazon. This is unusual because the books are not well known. Because the books do not sell well otherwise, they were very few used copies available for sale on Amazon.
Here's my AI theory: someone is purchasing lots of books en masse to be packaged and sold for LLM training to multiple clients (not just a single company like Anthropic), but only scanning once and then reselling the scans while preserving a "chain of custody" proof that individual copies were purchased. Claude shot that idea down for reasons related to the intricacies of US first sale doctrine and copyright law, but had an ambiguous response when I proposed that it might be Chinese companies doing something similar for training AI models that are intended for possible resale to overseas markets.
by ilamont - > “Under German law scanning books – regardless of the purpose – would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,”
Excuse me, what?
- https://law.stackexchange.com/a/93882
"Individual reproductions of a work by a natural person for private use on any medium are permitted, provided they are not used directly or indirectly for commercial purposes …"
by ZenDroid - German copyright law has no Fair Use. There are copyright exemptions for private or academic use, but commercial use has no such exemption. Books have special protection even according to § 53 (4) b).
And yes, it's the duplication which is illegal, not the publication of them.
by wasmitnetzen - > with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966
So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents.
If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest.
I've had family members in the used books business, and trust me the fate of the vast majority of these books was always to be pulped.
by vintermann - There are plenty of rare and precious books with ISBNs.by iamacyborg
- SBN started in 1967 in UK (W.H.Smith), official international book numbering (ISBN) is after 1970.by sixtyj
- > pulped.
Or have their covers stripped off and shipped out as "remainders."
Almost all the 60s science fiction I've owned came like this, bought on the pavement in port cities like Bombay and Madras. Container loads sold by weight.
by SanjayMehta - > “None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” German booksellers are not convinced. They are sure, based on the vast orders, that the process is happening anyway via third-party service providers.by nuclearsugar
- > on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo
Where can I see the scans and the transcripts in this "better status quo"?
by troupo - Why would any company keep evidence of their illegal operations after the deed was done? I'm baffled that you are even considering such hypothetical scenario. None of the LLM corpos are paying the copyright owners even a cent for using their IP for profit. Of course they will shred any remaining scraps and hide or delete all digitized data in the deepest illegal offshore possible.by Yizahi
- letting companies train on books for only the price of a paperback and then forcing them to destroy their scans would truly be the worst of all worlds. (ps: the scanning process typically destroys the book too; they chop off the spines.)
- > But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest.
only if they share the scans/transcripts and don’t hide it away.
by toofy