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The Vanishing Page: AI Firms Scan Then Destroy Rare Book Editions
(dallasexpress.com)
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One copy. One copy of each book. And they're not doing sexy vault heists for the last original manuscripts, they're just buying antiquarian junk by the ton, through a service that avoids giving them duplicates. If this process is a threat to the preservation of any particular work, it's probably because that work is undesired by anyone else in the world. Its eBay listing would end with zero bids. If it wasn't going from a warehouse to a scanner to the dump, it would likely go straight to the dump.
If you want this process to aid in general preservation, maybe take aim at how Anthropic got fined over a billion dollars for infringement. That's their motivation for doing this - that's the kind of money they risk if they share all their super-rare scans. Of garbage.