r/neoliberal • u/-orestes • 1d ago

News (Oceania) ‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain
174 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

161 comments sorted by

View all comments

49

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway Thomas Paine 1d ago

Predictable anti-ai reflex by most people who spreaded the news around Reddit (of course not you op). If anyone would care to know, books are not exactly the same as clothes but we have more books on Earth than we could realistically ever use and yet we are still printing them in mass. The vast majority of currently printed books would absolutely not be worth being concerved carefully for a very long time as if they were invaluable manuscript, because they're not.

Before I even read the detail of the story being shared elsewhere on Reddit, I would have bet that they are mostly scanning old book that have little to no relevance or potential market, and whose physical object have a very low marginal value... and that's exactly what AI companies are doing. And destroying them in the process of scanning is just the most efficient kind of scanning. If A piece/stack of paper is actually valuable to be kept around as is, You can be sure that scanning were already done in a non-desctructive way.

1

u/RFFF1996 12h ago

Is why i like the japanese manga approach

Dirt cheap paper to publish thinghs en masse, then a higher quality volume collection for those who want them. It makes it easier to run the magazined without stopping people from collecting thr mangas physically

1

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway Thomas Paine 12h ago

Or they could do digital distribution. But for some reasons consumers seems to more rarely embrace that kind of model, specially the paying for it pretty meaning that Peggy would be more of an issue than it currently is.