If you've got some comfort with tinkering:

https://www.diybookscanner.org/

Those who want to conduct large-scale scans and upload many titles can reach out to the archive for support, as the archive says that it “can help pay for the scanning fees and other rewards.”

Not like it’s their books to begin with. It’s all available as torrents

Eh, perfect is the enemy of good. I'll take the wins we can get. It's not like having to buy the books is gonna stop the biggest offenders from burning investor money (along with the books).

The defeat of LLMs isn't gonna come on that front. Let the cultists believe that more words will somehow become more than words. Their silicon gods run on power and water. That's where they're most vulnerable.

I am all up for starving machine learning of new knowledge but I view this as the least friction path. Otherwise, if the machines try to brute force their entry, what harm can kt cause?

Is this gif from that tom hanks movie?

Ah the American dream. Be greedy, selfish and only care about yourself.

Yet your countries keep helping and benefit almost like this is a global class war.

Perhaps there is a public library in your area that accepts donations? The one I live by is STARVING for support, they accept books, old computers, anything.

They do good work for the community too, like free tech literacy classes, chess for kids, etc.

But if you are dead set on an online NGO, then maybe archive.org? You have probably heard about their Wayback Machine, but they preserve books and other media too.

If you had clicked on the article before commenting instead of just reading the headline, you'd have seen that it was truncated on the lemmy post

And if you had read the small number of other comments before commenting instead of just reading the headline, you'd have seen this correction already be posted: https://lemmy.world/comment/25456917

Ages ago I had mimicked the "overhead scanner" with a mounted digital camera, but now I'd go with a mounted smartphone + light bars + bluetooth photo trigger. Scrolling through Bezos' was pretty depressing in terms of cost/quality and even a $150 device seemed like a repurposed webcam, with a sole non-free confirmed buyer saying it died after 3 months while freebies praise it lol. As long as you don't scan drawings/designs/comic books - just set lights evenly and that'd be enough, and even moreso if you OCR it and turn a scan into an e-book where visual fidelity stops to matter.

I don't know about buying, but the ones I have seen basically hold the book open at a 45 degreeish angle, to not damage the spine. Then you press the pages with a 45 degree set of glass plates. The actual "scan" is a camera of some kind that slodes back.and forth between the two halves on a mount.

same, probably when I'll have time in an other dimension I would love to make my own

Allegedly, it’s the rare, “undesirable” prints - the ones that just didn’t sell? Again, allegedly. But where’s a title disclosure?