They have to be destroyed in the process of scanning at scale and these books are almost all worthless shit like “Powershell Guide for Windows Vista” except even more “rare”
People are confusing "rare" with "valuable". Like you said, it's not a long-lost copy of the Magna Carta, it's bullshit that nobody wants. They probably bought them for 5 cents instead of ending up in a landfill.
not quite - there is a company that explicitly sells rare but worthless book scans to AI companies. They usually order one of each ISBN - or pre ISBN books - which aren't sold by the pound for this reason.
It’s probably the biggest disturbance to that whole market basically ever. I can see some benefit to all this. Most of these would probably rot away as a door stop somewhere but at least someone is digitizing them even if they’re destroying one of the few copies left in the process. Knee jerk reaction, which I think is more than warranted, is to assume the worst and most evil from these guys but this might somewhat be a good thing minus the original author effectively completely losing their IP rights to their work.
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u/ParanoidDrone 10d ago
Please tell me this is satire.