This feels like a "moment where good people took action in history books".

Anna's is the real deal

I have access to a book scanner, but I’m not sure what books need to be scanned, are legal to be scanned and uploaded (I don’t want to get expelled for using a school scanner to do something illegal), or whether there is personally identifiable data in the PDFs it generates (I think I can also save in GIF and maybe PNG?). Is there a beginner’s guide anywhere for all this?

Job Opening: Now Hiring

Description: Destroying the Library of Alexandria

Compensation: Minimum Wage ($7.25 per hour) plus free daily lunch (2 pizza slices)

Experience Required: Masters Degree in English, and at least 5 years experience working at a library or book store

Cover Letter: Please include a personal essay describing how destroying books gives you a personal sense of fulfillment

Non-profit Copyright Infringement (a.k.a. Piracy) is a Moral Duty, IMHO.

God the future is depressing

Setting aside the bad ethics of destroying rare books, the capitalist in me is very confused: Wouldn't you put in some effort to save the rare books, if only to sell them?

If you already have the data inside the books, you can put them up for auction, donating to libraries, and so forth. You get money, a reputation for ensuring that they find a home, have a physical backup if the storage drives fail, and so on.

...my inner capitalist is disillusioned. 🤨

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.

AI companys would probably like this. Easier for them to get data.

There's a ton of ancient documents and books that don't have copies of them (Chinese stuff for example that wasn't all digitized), please tell me data centers aren't seriously trying to take those as well and burn those as well

We could probably recruit the special collections departments at university libraries to help since they’re already equipped, but how do we identify and procure what needs to be preserved? I kind of assumed most books were already being digitized. As a student I worked on a project digitizing old newspapers and entering basic metadata.

The only book I have that might be worth scanning is Knight’s Modern Seamanship 13th edition from ~1960 (was provided to my mom as part of a record-finding request regarding my grandpa’s WW2 deployments, I have no idea why), but if my time in the Navy is any indication, its one of those things that was given during basic to all going through basic (I have a modern copy from 2007 as well), so idk if its a valuable contribution. Probably already in the archive.

I also have a copy of the joy of cooking from the 70s, and a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 50s, but I assume that’s also already in there. Plus some language textbooks and the like, some bird and geology books, some limnology books, etc. the sort of thing that’s definitely already there.

I’m willing to scan them, however a person does that, but I’m not willing to destroy them. The old books came from my grandparents, through my mom, and all of those people are long dead. Everything else is from my own education and I use them for reference.

A year too late