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Anna's Blog: AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late (annas-archive.gd)

submitted 13 hours ago by antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

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[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 50 points 11 hours ago

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not "rare" in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren't interested in quality, they're interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they'd release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that's where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They're just following the law, unfortunately.

I'm all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna's Archive. But that's a separate issue.

[-] veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 hours ago

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

Any particular reason why can't you just rebind the book after? Even if it is with a different binding.

(And no, I don't mean I'll take "capitalism" for an answer)

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 6 points 5 hours ago

I can imagine a couple of reasons.

The most straightforward one actually is "capitalism", but maybe if I explain it a bit you'll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they're probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they're still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It's like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for "disposal" in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There's lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that's easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called "signatures", typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn't leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that's a cost that produces a book that's probably worthless for resale anyway.

Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can't blame them too much.

[-] raman_klogius@ani.social 2 points 2 hours ago

Ah, the poetic irony of scanning physical slop to train digital slop.

[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 15 points 11 hours ago

You are correct.

Just want to add one thing, there MUCH easier ways now than those kind of setups. Its just not as cheap/accessible. I worked at a library and there is specific setups for certain kinds of books you cannot reproduce and still need to get a good scan in.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 6 points 11 hours ago

Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I've seen those contraptions, they're neat and I'd love to have one for my personal library someday.

[-] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 11 hours ago

They also exist with a vacuum puller that goes page by page, using a vacuum strip to hold the page tight to a scanner bar as it pulls upwards. Its just slower is all.

[-] ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I remember reading somewhere that there was a legal component to the destruction too. If they destroy the original it's a transformation form physical to digital but if they don't it's a copy which can be illegal.

[-] spring_cedar_dust@reddthat.com 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Plenty of approaches that don't destroy the book. These are years old solutions. They weren't first editions, but the point was there was no human with any archivist training making the decisions to destroy all the books. It was a free for all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLznMkyrCR4

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026

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