As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

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[–] 7 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

the problem is also that in "modern" books (like 50s, 60s, 70's and so on) these books themselves also tend to decay and just crumble after a time, due to some sort of process they do to the paper to create it. In order to truly preserve them you'd almost need like some sort of conditioned environment with the same temperature, no sunlight, stuff like that. Its a shame really, then again nothing in the world was meant to last forever.

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  • [–] 7 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    I encourage the conversion of books to digital formats, it is just that the method here is shortsighted. The physical copies can be useful if something goes wrong, and can be appreciated by some humans after the digital archival has redundancy.

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    true, if history has taught us anything its that archiving is important. and digital archiving is also very important. its just that well there could be a future were people don't even know how to read out all these digital devices anymore. and then they'll be back in the stoneage.

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