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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 18 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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[-] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 9 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Unfortunately it's a lot easier and quicker to scan a book if you remove the spine, since it's then just a bunch of pages that can be fed through an auto feeder. Proper book scanners that turn pages are slow and expensive.

I don't like the idea of destroying books, but it's certainly a lot less unsavoury to destroy a single copy to create a publicly available archive.

Not all, in fact probably the minority, of rare books have anything special about their binding. There's one reference book I've been looking for a copy of that was only published 20 years ago in paperback, but copies regularly sell for £150+ on ebay.

[-] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 16 hours ago

don't destroy books; repurpose them for crafts.

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026

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