In another comment regarding these books, you said:

They can keep both for all I care, tbh.

So it really seems you're just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don't care about the books or who they go to in the end.

Here's the usual video I use for this issue, a walk-through of the equations on how things cool in space where Scott Manley runs the numbers and shows that it's perfectly reasonable with a modest radiator panel.

What temperature are you assuming for the radiators? At 80° Celsius (353 Kelvin) they can do 880 watts per square meter. And bear in mind that radiator panels are double-sided, so that makes 1760 watts per square meter of dedicated panel. 80 degrees is what these chips are meant to run at, if you wanted to you could use a heat pump to make the radiator panels even hotter and they'd get much more efficient - according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law thermal radiation goes up proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Shouldn't be necessary here though.

There's a whole lot of answers in here saying cooling is impossible or super hard, and that people whose literal job is building satellites haven't thought of this. Or that the people whose literal job is building satellites haven't though about all sorts of other basic stuff like "you can't do maintenance on satellites" or "there's radiation in space" or whatnot.

Yes, they've thought of all those things. Those aren't useful answers

The main advantages continuous high-power solar energy, different regulations being in play (it's "outside the regulatory environment), and in the case of SpaceX it provides synergy with their own rocket launch business. They're creating their own demand, allowing everything to be cheaper in bulk.

Yes, it's to "raise the stock value." Isn't that why companies do anything? Doing a thing that produces value is going to raise the value of the stock of the company doing it.

First people complained about them pirating, now people are complaining about them following copyright. It should be clear at this point that the people complaining don't really care about either, they just don't like AI.

But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who's going to take them that values them more than that?

Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?

Oh, I'd thought he'd died already.

Ah well. Soon.

Well, who's talking about buying?

How else do you think they got the books?

Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other "normal" people. By our definition of "normal."

And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, "normal." Often when an election happens.

We would have anyway. One of the common symptoms of dementia is obsession.

I can imagine a couple of reasons.

The most straightforward one actually is "capitalism", but maybe if I explain it a bit you'll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they're probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they're still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It's like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for "disposal" in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There's lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that's easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called "signatures", typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn't leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that's a cost that produces a book that's probably worthless for resale anyway.

Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can't blame them too much.

They were numbered in the order that they were "discovered" (or theorized, in the case of population III). Similar to how exoplanets around a particular star are designated "a", "b", "c", etc. in order of discovery, so they usually end up not in any particular order in terms of orbital radii or size. Sometimes letters end up skipped when a letter is assigned and then it's discovered to be a false positive.

So there's logic to it, just not the logic one might prefer.

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not "rare" in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren't interested in quality, they're interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they'd release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that's where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They're just following the law, unfortunately.

I'm all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna's Archive. But that's a separate issue.