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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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[-] 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.

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026

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