Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- For those wondering why she's wearing wool and gloves indoors - New Zealanders typically can't afford electric heating, and wear woolen clothing in doors to to make up for this, when they can't burn firewood or coal.by LAC-Tech
- Lol but seriously 4th highest median wealth per capita. The median NZ citizen has 3x the wealth of the median us citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Of course they have very low wealth inequality so they don’t have trillionaires at all which some people may see as a problem. In fact remarkably despite the median wealth of NZ being so much higher than the USA they have a lower average wealth per capita.
They just spread the wealth around making the middle class 3x richer.
- Imagine thinking that wearing a sweater in wintertime means you're poor. Couldn't be me.
The gloves are a special kind made of thermal material for people with Raynaud's disease, where narrowing of the blood vessels reduces circulation in cold temperatures.
by anigbrowl - That’s a funny callback to last weeks RNZ article https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/cosy-ways-to-keep-warm-...
- Often kiwis can afford it but just choose not to. My own parents are well off and yet still have an absolutely freezing house all winter, it drives me crazy. Just put on a sweater, and another one over that, and a blanket....by kiwih
- More likely a second hand book store in Newtown is an old and draughty building. Running a heater in there would be the same as running one outdoors.
Or she just gets cold. My daughter wears those kind of gloves all winter regardless of how warm we heat the house.
by jemmyw - If only they could legally access the cultural heritage of mankind digitally.by protocolture
- I mean aren't thry literally just digitally scanning books that basically nobody else has?
I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost.
Rumors of rare books being destroyed would be the bad part of this but if "rare" is the tourist guide to a local cave why should we care?
Feels alot like the water argument
- > I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost
Unless they're sharing the scans publicly or with the Internet Archive or equivalent, they are being lost.
by sofixa - "Rare" may be a low print run of some local's memoirs decades ago, or a book on the local railway, a society of firemen, people sent to a world war etc. Not something that excites the world, but still valuable to historians or people interested in local history. Even the guide to a local cave from 1960s might be printed on bad paper (so many copies perished) and contain some technically obsolete details on the then-state of nature, tourism etc.by stereolambda
- How are they finding these books to order? I can't find used bookstores online anywhere.by ChiperSoft
- Probably through a “broker” like abebooks (an Amazon subsidiary) or Amazon itself.by Scoundreller
- Lots of used bookstores are online, and I’ve ordered lots of books that way.
This website for example may look like a user-to-user book sales platform but most books there are supplied by used bookstores: https://www.bokborsen.se/
by kzrdude - If the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies.by nullbio
- > If the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies.
Ah yes, the old "if you can't beat the ruthless type A sociopathic American capitalists who literally don't give a shit about anything other than money and power, then you should join them and make a quick buck while the world burns". A tale as old as time really; we must mirror the behaviour of people who'd tell their self-driving car to drive over a gaggle of baby geese in order to continue working on the important task of privatizing the world's knowledge. \s
Hell no. Small town bookstore owners probably have the best job in the world; if they're smart, they'd continue doing exactly as they're doing.
by brailsafe - Not sure copyright laws allow that?by rob74
- All the offense is that books are being destroyed. They're being destroyed b/c that's slicing off the binding to get flat pages is most convenient way to scan them. But ... could AI firms sidestep all the vitriol by paying to rebind the guillotined pages? I have no experience with such things, but if they were willing get the machines to do paperback thermal bindings (even if they sliced open a hardcover) and then donate or resell the books back into the marketplace, a lot of the "destroying rare books" emotions could be avoided.by abeppu
- No, there are two reasons they are being sliced:
1) It's easier to scan.
2) US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy.
by qingcharles - In the UK, each book published on the market must have a copy sent once to the British Library for preservation (and maybe other legal deposit libraries).
That’s a good built-in way to ensure public preservation of knowledge IMO
by jiehong - Same here in Czech Republic - also true for most printed periodical. I've been on a tour of one of these repositories - it is super impressive & the staff takes it super seriously.by m4rtink
- > A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects.
Canada is one of the few “western” countries without annoying customs duty/tariff requirements to ship to by post these days. US is a mess, and UK/Europe are going in the same direction.
by Scoundreller - This mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.
Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.
by wincy - Ok, but that's not what's happening. They are destroying the copies and not making them available to be shared. They are using them to increase the value of their business.
- They won’t share it.
And I bet it’s more likely that in 100 years you can read a book printed nowadays than you can read data digitized nowadays.
by croes - If the book really is difficult to come by I don't know that I'd prefer it to only survive as a statistical approximation that can be mostly retrieved if you utter the correct incantation. The AI trainers don't care about the book. It's just a commodified stream of words.by plorg
- Except we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world.
Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.
by jandrese - There's a bit of history to destroying books. So yes, anathema.by krautsauer
- It’s ugly. When there are still only some copies available of a certain book and they are all being sold the knowledge is gone. Let alone when it’s the only copy remaining.
That is of course not totally true, the copies are in private digital stores.
But for general public the knowledge is gone. Someone researching let’s say the history of a little village won’t be able to catch it.
This happens as well in current private collections. The physical book gets stored in a private book collection. But many also get out by the years when people are moving or die.
The amount of companies doing this is the real harm. There will be many companies running this process. It is absolutely not comparable to a single book collection getting burned in a house fire or being thrown away instead of donated to a second hand store.
It might feel for some as a not really big issue but actually it is in time.
by lucfranken - They got in trouble for violating copyright so now they are somewhat spitefully showing the alternative
- They are digitally scanning them? What knowledge is being lost here?