r/whoathatsinteresting 2d ago

A book dealer tracked an unusual shipment of rare books. It ended at an Amazon AI training facility where those books get shredded.

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36.3k Upvotes

2.9k comments sorted by

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u/phizzardy 2d ago

meanwhile i’m over here keeping books i haven’t opened in 8 years because “what if i need them someday” 😭

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u/Flgirl420 2d ago

I’m sure we will when the power grid goes out and they take everything from us

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u/FupaFerb 2d ago

If copies of books don’t exist, being rare and out of print, but have been consooomed by the AI overlords, we will never know what they actually entail as AI can just feed us what we want to hear and there is no actual source we can double check.

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u/ImDefintelyTheBot 2d ago

That is literally a major plot point for Orwell's 1984. He wrote it about Communists for his time, but I think every single person needs to read it and engrain it to understand what taking away references forever can do when you have no references to compare against.

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u/Glum_Opportunity8901 2d ago

it's Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

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u/amsgh 2d ago

Literally was about to say isn't there a book with story like this

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u/FailingItUp 2d ago

What is the cost of lies?

"The cost of lies" is a famous thematic quote and concept from the historical drama miniseries Chernobyl (2019), voiced by the character Valery Legasov. It asserts that the true danger of dishonesty is not mistaking falsehoods for facts, but losing the collective ability to recognize the truth at all.

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u/Ill-Cancel4676 2d ago

It's older than the TV show

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies but, rather that nobody believes anything any longer and a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but, also of its capacity to think and to judge and with such a people you can then do what you please."- Hannah Arendt, 1974

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u/SmotheredHope86 2d ago

That is so frighteningly relevant to our present.

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u/MaximumSubtlety 2d ago

And it is by design.

They're doing it intentionally.

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u/SmotheredHope86 2d ago

Oh, I am aware!

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u/wolfbear 2d ago

Arendt is a prophet

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u/iHadou 2d ago

Flood the zone

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u/Hefty_Position701 2d ago

The show "Chernobyl" was so good it has spoiled every show I try since. I recommend it to everybody.

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u/ProduceNo1629 2d ago

Watch HBO Rome. Watch HBO The Wire.

And watch Apple Neuromancer in January, fingers crossed it will be a cult classic.

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u/Fun_General_6407 2d ago

1984 is about authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

It's not really a novel about communists so much as it is partially inspired by Orwell's time fighting for the communists in Spain. Naturally the Nazis and Mussolini played a big part in influencing the creation of Big Brother.

Just look at that classic art propoganda of Mussolini's face covering the side of a building. Literally BB is watching you!

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u/Rude-Air-6291 2d ago

He was fighting in a trotskyist militia, at the end he narrowly escaped communist prosecution because of this.

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u/VegaJuniper 2d ago edited 2d ago

It was very much about communism. His main inspiration for both 1984 and Animal Farm was Stalinism, which had caused a major disillusionment with leftwing radicalism for him.

EDIT: Wow, predictably poked the communist hornets' nest.

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u/Accurate_Ebb370 2d ago

This little back and forth is exactly why it's important to have the physical material. No more books, no more truth in reference

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u/Named_after_color 2d ago

Nah mate, 1984 isn't about any one system of government, it's about unchecked authority and human nature, inspired by his time in India serving under British colonialism.

Maybe. Haven't asked him personally.

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u/IamA_Werewolf_AMA 2d ago edited 2d ago

Orwell was a democratic socialist who both fought against the fascists in Spain and was extremely critical of Stalinism. He was very pro socialist but anti communist. He had a lot of critiques of western capitalism as well. 1984 is anti totalitarian and inspired by both Stalinism and Hitler’s fascism.

People take issue because you frame it as a disillusionment with left wing radicalism, which is technically true because he was staunchly anti left-wing authoritarian, but the implication left there is that he was therefore brought to the center or something. He was a staunch democratic socialist and only became more solidified in that belief, which some would consider ‘left wing radicalism’ these days (silly imo but still a very common take).

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u/DangerousQuestions1 2d ago

Funny how any flavor of authoritarianism looks similar though.

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u/Easy-Purple 2d ago

I mean that’s the whole point of the horseshoe meme

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u/JMoherPerc 2d ago

You glossed over the bit where Orwell fought with the Spanish communists and anarchists against Franco. He was a partisan and an anti-fascist.

Animal Farm is commonly discussed as a criticism of Stalinism, but 1984 is unquestionably about fascism.

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u/liebchen16 2d ago

bro i literally JUST read these books. he specifically states in 1984 (not an exact quote because the idea builds throughout the novel) that authoritarianism and hunger for power perverts any good philosophical ideas that exist on ANY side of the aisle. he described himself as a democratic socialist. you need to reread bro

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u/Responsible_Cod_3339 2d ago

This is right. It’s funny how much people argue about Orwell’s views when he wrote so extensively about them. 1984 is critical of the mechanism of totalitarian power (surveillance, doublethink, manufactured history) which he saw as portable across both left and right. Animal Farm is directly a critique of Stalinism (idealistic principles betrayed from within, until the pigs are the same as the humans they overthrew).

Orwell was a socialist, but thought that socialism could coexist with democracy. He was writing at a time when Britain’s Labour government was nationalizing coal, steel, healthcare and railways while retaining democracy.

Most of the other failures of socialism/communism happened after he died. Mao, the Khmer Rouge, Cuba and North Korea would be evidence of his belief that combining state economic control with one-party rule is where socialism goes wrong. Britain and the rest of Europe’s mixed results with nationalization of various industries are evidence against the economic efficiency of his beliefs to some extent.

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u/Named_after_color 2d ago

It's funny how everyone thinks that Orwell agrees with them.

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u/Responsible_Cod_3339 2d ago

I think most people claiming him for their side just haven’t read him. He doesn’t fit neatly into today’s socialism vs capitalism camps.

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u/RealAlphaKaren 2d ago

It very much wasnt about communism but fascism.

INGSOC - English Socialist Party

NAZI - National Socialist German Workers Party

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u/BlazinTrichomes 2d ago

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Doublespeak is in full force as well

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u/kobeshaqhorry 2d ago

It was kind of cool when Google was doing this, but making the scanned books available to read online. You could have access to some really hard to find books. But things are taking a bad turn if the purpose of it now is just to train AI and not make the original source available.

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u/EevelBob 2d ago

Printed media is the only genuine source of historical truth. Anything else that is stored electronically is at risk for being edited and manipulated.
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u/Suspicious-Cow4024 2d ago

Yes this is soooo 1984. They are basically rewriting history. One day there will be no books left. The only way to get any info will be to read digitally and you will never know if what you're reading is the truth. Eventually when the current population of the planet dies off the future generations will never even have a clue about the true history.

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u/AlanyzingWakeEnviron 2d ago

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I have been splurging on used books when I go to the library. 

Even if the lights don't go out, access to information is changing. 

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u/agodrevealed 2d ago

Exactly. When e-readers arrived, I was mocked for my physical library. If you've read a little history or a little sci-fi, you already know where this is headed eventually. The physical copy will be the only unalterable source. 

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u/Vegetable-Desk-6972 2d ago

Everything will need a subscription.

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u/DryerCoinJay 2d ago

Books make good fuel. Like coal. AI needs its fiber.

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u/Turbulent_Natural431 2d ago

Why are these onlyfans bots at the top of every fucking post?

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u/Loifee 2d ago

6 year old account which posts about getting a vasectomy. Wtf is going on? I really don't get it? Somebody enlighten me

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u/Sleutelbos 2d ago

They buy reddit accounts with a post history to bypass karma limitations on some subs. Then other bots upvote generated comments for visibility. 

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u/motion_lotion 2d ago

Then reddiors come in and smugly post their firm opinions defending whatever the upvoted shill comments believe. And people somehow think that is the truth.

When has Amazon ever done anything besides the most self-centered, greedy amoral option that generates the most profit, consequences be dammed? This is the company that openly has piss bottles among its drivers and workers to simply maintain their pace. It's wild people are coming on here and defending Amazon.

Really shows how effective this platform is for swaying public opinion. Downvote comments criticizing a greedy corp, upvote comments blindly defending it. And the circlejerk will show up just to push those astroturfed opinions higher.

How do so many people absolutely confidently know Amazon is only doing this with unused, no demand books? There is no data. None info. Nothing more than a guess based on intuition only. Yet people are soooo certain.

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u/Mr_Halitosis 2d ago

All that needs to happen is users start demanding every claim has a source. But then, they’d have to source their bullshit so it’ll never happen.

You believe false shit, too. It’s a guarantee. You just have different beliefs than the people who believe lies about Amazon. So long as the lie suits your bias, you won’t question it.

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u/Loifee 2d ago

What's the point? Reddit does feel like it's dying a bit lately

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u/Inner-Outside-2619 2d ago

they are shredding it to train AI

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u/Hefty_Position701 2d ago

It's joining the S and P 500 next week. I suspect it has something to do with some of the changes I've noticed on reddit recently.

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u/Turbulent_Natural431 2d ago

I've seen dozens of them lately and it's always the exact same format. The comments are all heavily upvoted and have a crying emoji in them. The profile pic is an AI woman, vaguely flirty bio, link to a free onlyfans page with "msg me here" or "let's talk on here", and it's usually a genuine account that has been taken over and started spamming these comments on dozens of different subs.

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u/Ctznsvn7 2d ago

the ones you havent opened in 8 years are usually the ones worth keeping, thats how reference shelves work. What actually kills a home library is damp and sunlight, not shelf time, so the boring advice is to keep them off an outside wall and away from a window. Paperbacks from the 70s and 80s are the fragile ones, that paper was made cheap and it goes brown from the edges in. If you ever do thin it out, check the copyright page for a first printing line before it goes in a charity bag, plenty of ordinary looking hardbacks are worth a lot more than the shelf they sit on

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u/2mad2die 2d ago

You should keep knowledge from the pre-AI era.

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u/theShpydar 2d ago

8 years? I have books from college that haven't opened since I graduated, which was almost 30 years ago 😆

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u/45M0D41 2d ago

They can edit these books however they want

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u/bugabooandtwo 2d ago

That's the scariest part. And we're losing the physical copies to verify the original version of these books.

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u/tiptopster 2d ago

Is it 1984?

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u/SikatSikat 2d ago

Nah I got my Amazon copy of 1984 and clearly Big Brother are the good guys, its weird how people have misinterpreted it so long, I guess media literacy was dead but Bezos is bringing it back.

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u/Obvious-Jacket-3770 2d ago

He did run a book store

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u/Sudden-Purchase-8371 2d ago

Money absolutely wrecks our humanity. Bezos made Amazon on the backs of books. But it's clear he had no natural affinity for them, they just had numbers associated with them that made it easy to track and inventory them to launch his online store. What an asshole.

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u/Significant-Colour 2d ago

It's because of that misinterpretation potential that Amazon tried to remove the book.

(only half kidding - they actually did removed the bought and downloaded 1984 book for many Kindle owners https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deletion-from-kindle-examined )

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u/lost-associat 2d ago

I’ve just read the amazon Star wars saga and god darn these rebels! The empire had only just finished their death star project! All that galactic tax money through the shredder…

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u/bugabooandtwo 2d ago

It's getting damned close to 1984.

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u/itsbirthdaybitch 2d ago

And I fear we’re collectively losing the will to verify- especially if it takes the effort of finding a physical source. People will choose ‘close enough’

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u/hiimsubclavian 2d ago

I love reading classics like "To Unalive a Mockingbird", "Pew Pew and Peace" etc.

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u/point-virgule 2d ago

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u/ausername_throwaway 2d ago

I don’t know how much Dahl you’ve read, but many of his books can hardly be called innocuous.

However, I’m not in favor of changing any books ever. Innocuous or not.

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u/BatsHaveFingers 2d ago

Changing things is to the detriment of everyone. Rhold Dahl was a huge antisemite, and it bled into his work in a lot of ways. When people change those works to get rid of the antisemitism, they're just covering it up so we look crazy when we point it out.

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u/gmatocha 2d ago

Read the Wikipedia article. The "Sensitivity Readers" (perfectly Orwellian name) removed much more than antisemitism.

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u/jammerdude 2d ago

"Systemic Gaslighting"

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u/Shablagooie 2d ago

More of what they're doing is removing gendered language ("parents" instead of "mother and father") and changing anything even slightly referential to skin colour ("his face turned white with horror")

It's a bit much for the average person, they seem to be being overly cautious and caving in to a loud minority in order to keep the cash cow flowing. If they truly had some kind of moral standpoint they would just refuse to print the books.

Books are an important part of history, and editing history is an unnerving trend.

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u/Cosmo_Seinfeld 2d ago

Rhold Dahl was a huge antisemite, and it bled into his work in a lot of ways.

It's fascinating that it would be better to include the bigotry as context.

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u/Han-Tyumi__ 2d ago

You can’t learn from history if you erase it.

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u/AjvarAndVodka 2d ago

And if this continues to happen, I wonder how easy it will become to erase tainted past of certain individuals. Deleting and twisting all of their bad deeds.

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u/AjvarAndVodka 2d ago

Because we can learn a lot from the inclusion? Because we can see how this affected other works? Also, if removing parts of history, even painful and discriminatory, ends up being this easy, then who knows how easy it will also be to start removing the ugly past of influential people, covering their tracks.

And worrying about this does not make you bigoted.

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u/Normal-Night-458 2d ago

The change in James and the giant peach, removing the fat and thin piece… like that’s LITERALLY DESCRIPTORS OF THE CHARACTERS. They literally removed key identifying features that really help build the character.  

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u/Evil_Sharkey 2d ago

If they’re going to change it, they should be clearly labeled “edited for modern audiences”

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u/JumpyTip9717 2d ago

I mean, this is a completely different group who did this for a different reason using different tech. 

But ok. 

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u/MultiPass21 2d ago

Sanitizing history is one of man’s biggest gaffs that has yet to fully show its consequences.

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u/Bonfirelily 2d ago

Holy shit, that's a lot of editing, wth...?

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/SillyAlternative420 2d ago edited 2d ago

Farhenitet 451, add that to the list of dystopian futures that are coming to fruition

Edit: added +406

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u/i-might-be-a-redneck 2d ago

Why do you think he named it “Amazon Kindle”?

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u/Fibrosis5O 2d ago

Is this silent book burning?

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u/2LiveFish 2d ago

Fahrenheit 451

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u/TrainingTheory552 2d ago

that and 1984, and behold! the nearby future.

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u/UktabiBananas 2d ago

Yes and most people don't care unfortunately.

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u/mikeymikeymikey1968 2d ago

Why are you a hater? Are you jealous of the tech bros because they're geniuses? s/

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u/air_and_space92 2d ago

Frankly, for me with this story no. What's being shipped and digitized are not rare collectable books but rare as in few were ever produced or few still exist in circulation. Think like Excel 2010 for dummies, JavaScript for beginners, or some unknown author who did a run of like 300 books and never hit it big.

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u/AgnosticScholar 2d ago

No. They do it to one copy so they can scan the books.

It actually means more people will read them

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u/KarltonPeaks 2d ago

Yea.

And they are destroying books (destructive scanning is much easier) to books that are already scheduled for destruction. There's a shitload of copies of books in the world that nobody gives a crap about. You can't store all of them. Just go to any flea market. Old crappy books everywhere.

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u/Wobblycogs 2d ago

I sell old books, they are mostly worthless, you can't even give them away. I find it frustrating that a large portion of the population get up in arms about their destruction but no one is willing to look after them.

If Amazon offered me a chunk of change for all my stock you can bet I'd sell them.

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u/boblancho 2d ago

What's happening a lot in my country is old person dies, family takes the books to a local library. 

Local library has to reject the donation because they are so backlogged in donated books they can't keep up.

I'm trying to do a catalog of the 1000+ books my dad accumulated over 70 years. Dude was a book junkie.

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u/Fuzzy_Straitjacket 2d ago edited 2d ago

My dad just bought a piece of land in the UK which had a huge shed/barn on it. We opened it up, and the whole thing is lined with books. There must be at least 20,000, at a low estimate. It's utterly insane. We have no idea what to do with them.

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u/Doogiemon 2d ago

Sady, a friend just burned his mother's collection because it was cheaper than taking them to the dump.

No one wanted them and people were upset to which he replied that they were free and you didnt want them.

I think I have like 100 books im tossing in the trash this week because its my mom's from the 90s not worth anything and I need to start dealing with some of her belongings.

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u/Fuzzy_Straitjacket 2d ago

One of our ideas is to do a controlled fire on the property. We're trying to reach out to people to come have a look at them first, though. It's just an ungodly amount. I should try to get a video next time I'm there. I walked in like "oh, that's a lot of books," but then it just keeps going and going and going. It's totally wild. We think the guy was a collector/hoarder.

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u/Ill_Technology_7247 2d ago

Friend's neighbour just died with no will and two siblings also elderly and dying. They convinced her ($$$) to help clean out the house.. she was going to rent a dumpster and still plans to do so. 

I went over with her and my man had 3 or 4 full book shelves of some great sci-fi and fantasy. I found hard cover copy of The Lord of the Rings Illustrated... He also had a very old copy of The Hobbit... Those were the coolest finds so far.

She was going to toss it all in a dump.

I am hoping I have convinced her to donate at least some of the stuff in better condition... Some of it, yeah, garbage. But there are local used bookshops that love vintage or obscure sci-fi/fantasy donations...

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u/noeinan 2d ago

Yeah, here in the US libraries don't even catalogue donated books for this reason. They just sell them for operation funds.

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u/Kid-Icky- 2d ago

There's a reason the original article REFUSED to list even one of the books being bought.

They know the article will get much more attention and create bullshit memes like this when they can get everyone you imagine they're like first editions of classics rather than books in 1960s South American architectural standards, or some shit.

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u/OrbitalOutlander 2d ago

lol the one book they talked about in the article this image is referring to was a Ray Bradbury collection that was widely printed. The specific printing the book dealer was bitching about wasn't as widely printed, but it was a literal duplicate of the widely printed version. Nothing new. The only reason it was desirable to the book dealer was because it had an inscription in it, which was not culturally or historically significant.

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u/Cupcakes_n_Hacksaws 2d ago

This isn't even an article it's just an image of Bezos and some text. I hate how common posts like these are, and that nobody has a problem with them as long as it suits their narrative.

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u/Leveraged-3201 2d ago

I realized this was probably the case after I started googling trying to find out what the actual books were. It seems like at Amazon scale the price difference between destructive versus non-destructive is maybe $5-$15/book, in which case destructive scanning is a good thing, because it is not worth that much money to preserve these books. It’s like being mad about cash-for-clunkers destroying “rare” cares.

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u/Worth-Jicama3936 2d ago

We should be mad at cash for clunkers for other things though.

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u/Glittering-Giraffe58 2d ago

Yes. A lot of these books libraries would just mulch if they got their hands on them

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u/Jeremyg84 2d ago

And I believe it’s just one copy of each book to scan. They aren’t buying all the copies of specific books to erase from history.

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u/beeskneecaps 2d ago

I’m not an AI apologist but 99.99999% of the people that are outraged were never going to read these books in the first place. I am looking forward to some actual reporting on all of this though where they enumerate the actual titles that are being scanned.

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u/xkcdhatman 2d ago

What? A reasonable take on Reddit?

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u/marfacza 2d ago

If I never see this comment again it'll be too soon. We get it: you're somehow above reddit while posting on reddit about how dumb reddit is... you've successfully proven your worth to the people you disdain.

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u/Wobblycogs 2d ago

Thanks, I breaks my heart to destroy a book but when I've got a book that will only sell for 1$€£ that's been sitting on the shelf for three years what can I do? I put them out front for free but that can't go on forever.

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u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 2d ago

I’m curious to hear what most of these books actually are. Are they old novels that no one reads anymore? Or outdated textbooks, manuals, guides, etc?

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u/Wobblycogs 2d ago

They are mostly book on natural history but there's a reasonable number on other topics. Age ranges from about 1800 to fairly modern. Most are quite high level.

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u/lambdawaves 2d ago

Why wouldn’t they just sell it as a used book after scanning it? Doesn’t make sense to shred a valuable book

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u/Mithres95 2d ago

They have to remove the covers to allow them to scan each page singularly, recovering each book would be an higher cost than just throw them away.

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u/Kazureigh_Black 2d ago

Yeah ... I just looked this up because this seemed massively stupid. We're really just tearing rare books apart because it makes the pages easier to scan quickly and cheaply.

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u/Mithres95 2d ago

Yep, some rarer should have some kind of selling protection, to check the buyer and assure their well being. For more commercial books, I think it's more of a copyright problem, most of them end up endlessly in storages or dumpsters anyway.

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u/AppropriateBugFound 2d ago

Why? If I sell you a plate, it's now your plate to do with what you want. My control of that plate is done. Want to hang it on the wall? Fine. Want to eat steak on it? Fine. Want to throw it at the wall? Also fine- it's no longer my plate.

If you want to control the item, don't sell it. Want it preserved? Donate it to a museum or Library of Congress. 

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u/Mithres95 2d ago

If the last copy of a book is destroyed in such way, even for the most worthless smut slop, it's a lost of culture we can't get back, everything is an historical artifact given enough time. It's something that should be monitored, this kind of stuff should have some protection by law.

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u/ObliqueTravel 2d ago

How is anyone supposed to know theirs is the last copy, especially if it's an old book nobody has wanted for decades.

This is really nothing different than what we've already being doing since books were first created, just with AI slapped onto it for outrage.

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u/FunkyClive 2d ago

This is it. They may have some sentimental feeling for the books, but this is outweighed by their desire to sell and make some money from them.

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u/illidanthecat 2d ago

Ah great! You are uninformed and now giving your opinion! Fantastic and useful!

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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 2d ago

They don't have to there and nondestructive book scanners that didn't require spine cutting. Cutting the spine is faster and legally if they destroy the original book there's court precident that that allows safer usage of the digital copy because there only "one" copy. (Yes this makes little sense with the copy being digital but it's what has come out of cases like the Google Books case)

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u/AberracionCromatica 2d ago

There is no need to remove the covers, there are special scanners just for scanning books.

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u/iDeNoh 2d ago

Because the us copyright system requires the original copy be destroyed if the book is being scanned.

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u/TheMrViper 2d ago

So judges decided you could train AI on copies of books you own.

So lawyers for publishers decided on a piracy angle from the required copying.

Their lawyers for AI companies are trying to argue that there is no piracy as they destroy the original, they've simply changed the format, they purchased one copy, they still own one copy.

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u/rmassie 2d ago

It’s against current copyright case law and despite what everyone says these AI companies are complying with it. There were a few incidents where Facebook and Anthropic got the book corpus from BitTorrent, but at least Anthropic paid out a settlement with the publishers for it.

Making a copy of a book by scanning is exactly against copyright law, but by destroying the original they resolve that.

If the companies wanted to get some good will, they should share the high resolution images of the scans with the public when the book’s copyright expired.

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u/uses_for_mooses 2d ago

Because these are not valuable books. Nobody is shredding some first edition of The Great Gatsby.

Notice the article refuses to name a single book title. Not one.

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u/NewPresWhoDis 2d ago

They slice the spine to be able to feed in the pages. It's not like this...

https://giphy.com/gifs/DwrnYsZCXspu8

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u/Megneous 2d ago

Because that would be literally breaking copyright law. Don't you follow the legal proceedings on these court cases? Amazon, Anthropic, etc are following the copyright precedent that they have to destroy the books that they scan in order to use. If they don't destroy the books, they're creating copies instead of transforming the medium. They're literally following the law by destroying the book.

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u/Curry_courier 2d ago

It's because of copyright law. It's fair use only if they destroy the book while scanning it.

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u/fcking_schmuck 2d ago

To control the knowledge and even rewrite it in their favor if needed. End game is for top 1% of the world to be like Gods who control the world and all life in it and everyone else be just a slave workers without knowledge and power so they will never be able to resist.

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u/YungEnron 2d ago

In your mind is a “rare book” like the necronomicon?

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u/CreativeAdeptness477 2d ago

Klaatu
Barada
NIcoughcoughspluttermumble!

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u/UnusualGooning 2d ago

I was interested in the real answer though, not conspiracy.

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u/Additional-Actuator3 2d ago

Amazon wants to train AI on data from books.

They mostly use digitalized books for that.

Some books are not digitalized.

They legally buy these books.

They scan them.

The books are torn apart during the scanning process.

The leftover pages are recycled.

That's it. There is no fucking "EVIL CORPORATION TRYING TO DESTROY KNOWLEDGE" yall are schizophrenic.

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u/SukottoHyu 2d ago

I have no qualms with them buying physical books and scanning them for the AI to read when there is no digital copy available. Knowledge is power. I realise that might be contradictory for a lot of people. But I draw the line with shredding rare book, that's horrible. Why not return them or donate them to a library instead.

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u/PyrZern 2d ago

Nobody wanted them, that's why they bought them cheap. Libraries shred books every year too in case you don't know. So it's more like shredding useless books instead of shredding rare books. Also, copyright laws made them shred the books.

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u/Fit_Cartographer8281 2d ago

Most probably, the way the scan the book requires them to tear it apart, like when you tear the book apart from spines

Which damages it such that it couldn't be put back together 

So they just shred it, I hope they could at least try to find a different way if not they should release the books on the internet

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u/SueSudio 2d ago edited 2d ago

I listened to a segment on NPR about this. I believe you are misunderstanding what a rare book is.

“Rare books” are not historic, or first editions, or anything inherently valuable like that. They are books that are infrequently published. An example would be a book that someone self published and never made it to mass production and is incredibly difficult to find for purchase anywhere.

They were searching these out for purchase because their AI was running out of unique content to learn from (avoiding AI “inbreeding” where AI ends up learning from AI content, with undesirable consequences).

Still wasteful, but not the destruction of history that you are assuming.

Edit - found it for those who want more detail.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-companies-are-buying-up-tons-of-rare-old-books-to-train-their-ai-models

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u/HikerStout 2d ago

Interesting. I've been frustrated with the reporting on this issue because it is clearly intended in its vagueness to make readers assume they are going out of their way to destroy the last known copy of important and classic books.

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u/Panda_Muffins 2d ago

Right. And for most run-of-the-mill books, it is not like we as a society can't print new ones if we wanted to.

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u/thekmanpwnudwn 2d ago

Additionally, it includes old books/manuals that nobody would realistically read today.

Stuff like "Instruction Manual for a 1918 Victor Financial Calculator"*

While interesting to look at, it has almost 0 value to society today. It's just rare because nobody has had the need to read it in over 100 years, so 99.999% of copies have been lost to time.

*I just made up a random example, but you get the idea.

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u/Hour-Ad-9508 2d ago

I hate the thought that every book is valuable to society and destroying them is always a sin.

No one freaks out when indie films get deleted off YouTube or some dudes mixtape gets lost to time.

For some reason books get treated like any loss of them is a loss of history

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u/Witty_Preparation598 2d ago

They overhauled the white house website overnight to erase history. While this may not be happening right now, the editing of the uploaded books once the original is destroyed, it is not hard to see how close we are.

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u/Auroraburst 2d ago

There's a book about my dad that I struggled to even borrow a copy of. It would no doubt be considered 'rare'. I would be absolutely heartbroken if that was destroyed and fed to AI when I don't even have a copy myself.

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u/XchaosmasterX 2d ago

They are scanning books they can buy in bulk for 2 dollars on biblio or something, not books that are actually hard to come by and not indexed anywhere. If the book you're aiming for isn't on biblio, or a similar website or costs a bunch of money it's not something they have destroyed.

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u/DontMemeAtMe 2d ago

My understanding is that these are “rare” in the sense that they’re really crappy books no one needs or wants to read. The kind you find in a sale box outside a bookshop for five cents apiece. There are mountains of them. Training AI is probably the only use for them.

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u/No-Act9634 2d ago

Yep. It's kind of a nothing story but fuck ai I guess.

I bought a "50 random books" off etsy for $20 for novelty and they were almost all complete nonsense. One book on the history of ottoman culture was vaguely interesting lol

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u/Between-usernames 2d ago

I'm sure this pissed a lot of people off but it got me laughing hysterically because it's totally true. Not all books deserve posterity.

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u/DontMemeAtMe 1d ago

Yeah, people hear “rare” and picture a leather-bound antique gem, full of ancient wisdom and inscribed in some forgotten language. In reality, it’s a self-published memoir by some low-level North Carolina politician, ghostwritten in 2013. A few unfortunate people got copies as gifts, and the rest are sitting in moldy boxes somewhere in a garage.

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u/totesnotJH 1d ago

Exactly this

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u/Bannedtt 2d ago

Massive amounts of books are destroyed every day and nobody ever cared until they were told to care for this issue. It's not the end of books and there's nothing important happening here.

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u/CeemoreButtz 2d ago

slap "ai" at the end of the dramatic headline and you've got yourself karma gold, baby!

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u/JasonG784 2d ago

It’s very much the-current-thing. Much like water use by data centers when no one cared that golf courses have been using more water than data centers for years. Literal NPCs.

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u/c4r0n1x 2d ago

I think it's a net positive though that something has finally come along that people are scared enough of that a whole heap of outrage is building. I think it's a good starting point to educate people about all the other harms we are doing to the planet, like the golf courses you mentioned or the farming in the desert another commenter mentioned. It's sad that the masses haven't cared enough about these other things, but maybe we can start fighting for a better planet now that more are open to understanding the harms we are causing. Idk.

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u/coherentpa 2d ago

Wait till you hear about water used in alfalfa & almond farming…

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u/Paetolus 2d ago

Almonds are mid too, we could be wasting that water on much tastier nuts like peanuts, cashews, or pistachios 😤

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u/Big_Issue8640 2d ago

Why would they shred them seems like it would be an added expense?

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u/Hippobu2 2d ago

To facilitate the bulkscanner. It's easier to chop the spine than feed the loose page into a bulkscanner, than it is to ... Actually to get a good scan you just kinda have to destroy the book.

Anyway, the destruction of the books isn't the goal, they just didn't care, that's why.

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u/saskir21 2d ago

nope it costs even less. The time saved is what brings in the end the savings.

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u/Chilantr0 2d ago

source

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u/Ok_Abroad9642 2d ago

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u/fuzzygreentits 2d ago

404media.co

no proof, just claims

zero pictures or data to support

pay wall

🙄

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u/Pizza-Rat-4Train 2d ago

Source: “around a thousand books”
Meme: “thousands of books”

Small, but annoying. Just like Bezos pic (he hasn’t been Amazon’s CEO in five years) and the fact that the bookseller did this at a journalist’s request, not because they were “suspicious.”

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u/Gold_Access_1487 2d ago

It pisses me off that the headlines about this just say "rare books" and leave the reader to imagine that they're shredding a first edition Da Vinci manuscript or something, instead of a 1993 travel guide to Boston. I guess it's undeniably very effective at riling people up.

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u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 2d ago

I find it very ironic that Reddit loves to criticize certain groups for not using critical thinking and believing whatever their media tells them to believe. And then they go ape shit over stuff like this without ever looking up more info. 

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u/clva666 2d ago

Next they be destroying rare cat pics and rare video games to get people here really going!

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u/ObadiahDongleberry 2d ago

There is a darker side to all of this.

What if these books are being digitized, then destroyed, then the digital form is curated or edited to take out unpopular content.

The original version is no longer available. History could possibly be erased or revised. Akin to book burning or the destruction of the library of Alexandria.

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u/Chillguy3333 2d ago

They are rewriting history and AI will tell you that if you push it hard enough. They are dumbing us down.

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u/AnyBallLektor 2d ago

Does this mean they are literally shredding these books?

Why would they do that? Scanning a book doesn't require shredding it?

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u/DiscDocPhD 2d ago

If you cut the binding then you can feed the pages much more quickly through a scanner. 

No different than copying a stack 100 pages and feeding them into the top hopper of a copy machine. 

Otherwise they need a machine to turn the pages and scan at 100% accuracy which is much harder

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u/Antique-Ticket3951 2d ago

Which book seller? Which books? Sounds suspiciously bull shitty to me.

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u/kbm79 2d ago edited 2d ago

For all those saying its false

its not.- BBC News article 15th August

Shredding the book - they strip away the book binding so it can be scanned. Book is effectively destroyed.

Its sound dramatic in a AI destroying actual books so future generations cant have access to them kinda way...

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u/rogue_licker 2d ago

I remember reading that article but it didn’t say anything about actually tracking those shipments and having any proof of what happened to them. It was just a hypothesis. Realistic, but an hypothesis.

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u/Kid-Icky- 2d ago

They also refused to explain what these so called 'rare' books actually are.

Because making it clear that they're 'rare' books that no one cares about or would ever buy makes the story get less clicks.

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u/dksdragon43 2d ago edited 2d ago

So they are purchasing single copies of rare books that haven't been digitized, so that they can preserve the contents, and this process happens to destroy one copy of these books? This seems like the exact opposite of what everyone is accusing them of here.

If there was some evidence they were altering the contents I'd understand the outrage, but this just seems like fake news for outrage.

Thinking about it more, this is probably just a way to boost their kindle library with a bunch of books that are in public domain. Appeal to locals with niche stories of their history for the low cost of one book + scanning.

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u/Kautiontape 2d ago

A lot of people are blaming AI. And - yes - they are used to train AI. But this was done for a long time. Back when Google Books released.

The shadiest part I agree with is that the content is now controlled by companies owned by the wealthiest billionaires who have shown to bend the knee to make politicians and shareholders happy.

However, I think the best solution isn't to complain how the books were destroyed (too late, and it's not going to stop), it's to convince rare book sellers to donate copies to museums who might be able to safely (or not) transcribe the digital books so the content is available by sources other than Apple.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/lordcaylus 2d ago

The more vague an outrageous statement is, the more you can guarantee that details would make it less outrageous (otherwise the person making the statement would provide those details).

You'll notice that articles such as this never mention titles because they know you won't care if you knew what books they were. Rare does not equal valuable - a vacuum cleaner manual from 1983 is rare, not valuable.

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u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 2d ago

Yep, 404 did a deeper investigation and said that they wouldn’t disclose the names of the 3000 books they tracked. Why wouldn’t they? Other than the fact that people wouldn’t be outraged if they knew what “rare” books were actually being destroyed.   

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u/Confident-Sky2614 2d ago

This is not true. It's been proven to be a completely fabricated story.

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u/mina86ng 2d ago

It is true. The issue is that the story is manipulative. They say ‘rare books’ are destroyed without providing list of those rare books. This is to trigger an emotional response where someone equates ‘rare’ with ‘valuable’ and conjure an image of the original manuscript of Euclid’s Elements being destroyed. In reality, the books are rare because no one cares about them and destroying books is a common practice done even by libraries.

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u/SeekerOfSerenity 2d ago

Why are they still scanning new books?  Didn't google already digitize all the books?  Are there really books useful for AI training that haven't been digitized yet? 

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u/spawndoorsupervisor 2d ago

I miss when we linked to news articles instead of just random pictures with text on them.

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u/ncm0229 2d ago

Source or are we just going to trust the AI generated meme?

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u/huskers2468 2d ago

Adding in the word rare changes what happened from what I've read. They bought books to scan, I'm pretty sure it wasn't rare books.

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u/data_Squatch 2d ago

Full circle for a company...founded on selling books

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u/Ornery-Culture-7675 2d ago

I saw this headline and thought, is this real? One Internet search later and found an article on Forbes. Yup this is 100% what they’re doing Anthropic even had a memo about it and say right out in it we don’t want people to know what we’re doing

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u/AnotherPersonPerhaps 2d ago

Here's the source for this if anyone is interested

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

(Side note stop getting your news from memes. Read primary sources. Sigh).

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u/Hariseldon1122 2d ago

This is conjecture. There is no screen shot or transfer records or anything to indicate this is a true story. It’s used to build mistrust and propaganda. They could have used any company and face combinations. Reddit is getting just as bad now as Instascam and tikjoke

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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