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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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When a bookstore goes out of business or just can't sell a book, they don't return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
Yeah that's exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They're taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don't they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I'm as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don't have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
They also initially took content from libgen, which is a fair bit less legal. Personally, I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don't like some shitty for-profit AI company making money from the collective works of civilisation. On the other hand, I think copyright protects works for far too long anyway and most should be in the commons already. Mind you, I would be more sympathetic if Anthropic et al. were doing all this for research purposes instead of capitalism. Maybe that would be a better copyright reform, in that it expires much more quickly than the current laws (say 10 years) but restricts third parties making a profit for a longer period. Likely that would be complex to design and enforce, however.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn't make it okay.
Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It's not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it's still frustrating to see it.
I wouldn't say print books have no place today, it can't be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it's definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.
Even teenagers sometimes prefer dead tree books to ebooks. Back when I worked in a public library, we could tell when a book was assigned reading because we'd suddenly get 10 requests for our 2 copies. The students had access to the ebook, they just preferred paper.
I didn't say words were sacred, but destroying millions of books is a colossal waste of resources. This is not totally fine.
The resources were wasted by everyone involved. Stop defending this bullshit.
How is destroying millions of books not wasting them? Use your goddamn brain you troll.
I don't mind if they destroy 10k copies of Fabio's books. It's probably not even half of the print run so for a thing, it's guaranteed to be no harm because there's enough copies around.
But when you say destroy ALL books, you're also talking about rare first edition of whatever Shakespeare did, and manuscripts of Beethoven, and authors that I am fond of but I have no chance to buy used or new, or find in a library, because it's not popular and/or is in a language that is not from the place I live. And that's not cool.
So first things first, no single entity can have access to all books. Not even reputable historians would get access to anything they just ask around. Then there's books that have few copies and no one has any clue where they are. Etc etc.
Haha I remembered this post and though it was worth dropping it here
https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1739559/uncle-claudius-s-bibliography-forever-lost