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  • Hacker News
  • The scariest thing for me about companies not caring even minimally about conservation is that when AI gets more powerful than humanity (which is clearly a when not an if, even if there's a lot of uncertainty and differences in opinion about the time horizon here), I want to hope that AI will care more about conservation of human people.

    So far from how I see how powerful organizations work, I'm not as certain as I would like to be.

    by xiphias2
  • "rare" is used in these headlines/articles to incite and generate clicks
    by spogbiper
  • Rare as in your grandfather's John Deere manual from 1982, not rare as in a test print run of The Great Gatsby. The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means.
    by ursuscamp
  • > We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked, but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many people speak.

    Not even the title of one of those rare books?

    by andsoitis
  • This feels like a manufactured controversy. What difference does it make to me what someone does with a book after they buy it? It's effectively unavailable to me regardless of what they do. If people are really concerned about these "rare" books, they should lobby the copyright owners to release them online or print more copies.
    by olalonde
  • The length of this article and the unnecessary visualizations felt like a waste after getting to the end and discovering they won’t reveal anything about the books that were scanned.

    The closest they got was admitting that the rare books weren’t anything that someone might care about in the sense that people assume when we hear “rare books”

    > As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.

    Okay? But then why exactly where they considered valuable enough to warrant an entire article about them going to a book scanning facility? Without revealing anything about these books I have no idea if they were classic literary works that were underappreciated, or if this was some old guide about How to Use Microsoft Office 97.

    There was a more balanced take on Twitter (which I’m unable to find again, because Twitter) from a book seller who said it was more of the latter type: Books that were rare because they were no longer in demand and most everyone had thrown their copies away. Some parts of the media are doing backflips to try to imply that these are cherished literary classics being fed into the shredder to deprive humanity of something valuable, but the book seller seemed happy to be making sales for useless old books that no human was interested in buying.

    by Aurornis
  • The Embassy of the Free Mind (https://www.embassyofthefreemind.com) is a rare book library in Amsterdam that is scanning books the old fashioned way… leading to https://SourceLibrary.org — a collection of over 5,000 books from the renaissance that have never been translated before. Consider donating, if this is a topic you care about!
    by dr_dshiv
  • I really have trouble getting worked up about this. "Rare books" is thrown around regularly but my gut feeling is that's not the case. These are used (often? always?) books and while I'm sure there is waste, in general they just want 1 of every book.

    While I wish there was a repository of every book that was already digitized (it pains me this is the best solution), there isn't one and so I think this is not a real problem.

    It'd be a different story if they had furnaces that ran only on rare books that they had to continually feed books to but that's not what's happening here. And that 1 destroyed copy will "live on" in a way that it otherwise might not.

    by joshstrange

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