Amazon, destroying books, this is such a full circle moment for them
They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won’t get it.
Amazon wasn’t caught doing shit. “Caught” implies there is a possibility of consequences. Two days from now nobody is going to remember this story and the world will move on and there will be no consequences for this.
“caught” also implies they’ve been hiding it… It’s been out in the open how they scan books to train AI for a while now.
I don’t think most people realize that the most efficient process for scanning books involves disassembling them.
So of course they’re upset to hear the books are disposed of afterwards.
It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.
Especially since the articles make it clear that the AI companies don’t care about rarity or quality. It’s just a dragnet to get as many books as possible. Sure, a lot of the books are going to be garbage, but some of them are going to be valuable, too.
The AI must be fed, and the only criterion is the book has to be published before 2022.
Whistle-blown?
I wish there were any path for accountability anymore.
Can they at least provide all the scans to the public for free? It’s not like anyone is going to care if they violate copyright, that only applies to regular people.
Unfortunately, that would violate copyright law. In fact, the whole point of the destruction is to circumvent copyright, as apparently there was a ruling that scanning, tokenizing, and then destroying the original is transformative enough to be considered, “fair use.”
You are definitely right. It just sucks that destroying books is “fair use” while using movie clips to make a parody video gets taken down with little recourse.
You think they give a fuck? These people are going to get to the point where they would take aim at random people with rifles and shoot them for fun and then act like they did nothing wrong.
Of course they would see an issue with that… If they are aiming themselves, it means they can be aimed at… So they will do it via drone.
That’s why they are scanning them and destroying them. Someone realized they can capitalize knowledge. We’re going to get the privilege of letting billionaires gate keep information and knowledge
I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
Friends don’t let friends use any form of Amazon they can choose to.
They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.
So what they’re saying is, we should start making as many legit-looking books full of bullshit and gibberish as possible, then send them to Nevada where they can be used to help “train” their AI.
They scan them and destroy them so other AI companies can never get them.
Other AI companies can still buy them, they’re just rare because nobody bought them in the first place. They destroy them because scanning them is faster and in some jurisdictions that absolves you from copyright infringement since the amount of copies doesn’t go up
I’m just repeating what 404 media said on their July 21 podcast. They said that the first reports of AI book buyups were in Spain and the Netherlands, from rare book traders. The theory is that these AI companies are in a race to get the rare books first because they will be scanned and destroyed and they know that the widely circulated books will be available later
Edit: and if you scan and destroy rare books then you have an advantage over the competition, another company can’t scan a book you’ve destroyed
I’ve been boycotting Amazon since 2004. Waiting for everybody else to see it too. … See it yet??? Everybody???
fucking book burners
It’s like if Fahrenheit 451 had the firefighters meticulously remove the spines and digitize the books before burning them. Amazon is buying a single copy of these books, and destroying the books to make it faster to digitize. Just not at all book burning.
You should be pissed about them using other peoples works to train their AI behemoth for profit. Not make a false equivalence to book burning…
that information is as good as gone if its in the hands of corporation while they destroy the original. also, you cant get the original info back from the training data, what they are doing is kind of like putting the information in a blender.
and since they destroy the original books, no one else can have them. They also destroy piece of history since physical book is immutable while digital information can be tampered with. With rare books its possible they are destroying the last copy of the book, no way to know for sure.
And i’m already beyond pissed that they use others work for profit. It has already been demonstrated that corporations are above any law, as long as they can manage their bribes and connections. You should trust corporations as much as you would a demon if demons were real.
Why not just scan them carefully and use the pictures?
The answer to that question is obvious. They can do it 1000x faster cutting the spin and sending all the pages through a scanner. Otherwise you have to have something flip through every page and take a picture.
I figured. But sometimes the inconvenience should be part of it. I am fucking sorry. This is just disgusting…
https://lemmy.world/search?q=rare+books&type=Posts&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=true
This has been posted to death. Does this really need ot be a weekly thread? There is nothing to discuss its bad and we hate AI and we hate amazon.
I’ve been on Lemmy since 2023 and I’ve never seen this article. Not everybody is chronically online. Please don’t listen to this guy.
Repost spam kills forum discussion. If you missed this post you can see it in the 10 other places it was posted yesterday.
That’s what Lemmy is. Regurgitating the same story over and over again. For months.
DAE communist manifesto, AI Bad, tanks good?
The most ironic thing is that this is the only way that the current cultural metastasis appreciates rare knowledge. Which we once did!
Like music it is the most fundamentally human endeavor and it has been destructively gamified. Thank fucking god for libraries, support yours!!!
Nothing good ever came of destroying books.
Except when they are digitized and made publicly avaiable
