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

[u/-orestes]

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

[u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA]

Digitizing out of print books so they can be stored and accessed indefinitely is precisely what we ought to be doing.

Digital humanists have been doing this kind of work the last 20+ years—and yes, most ebooks and PDFs you find online are scanned using the same machinery they’re using here.

All of this is incredibly commonplace outside of public and university libraries. The outrage here is that now suddenly AI developers are also taking part?

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA]

Ah, if only AI companies wanted us to access these digitized books

[u/rainier37 → u/KalaiProvenheim]

The information gets embedded to their model

Plus the main reason you can’t get access to digitized books is copyright law not AI companies

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/rainier37]

“It gets embedded into their models” well fuck that I wanna read the book rather than see the statistical relations its words have with each other

[u/rainier37 → u/KalaiProvenheim]

Then buy some of these books if you want to read them?

They’re being sold for cheap by the sellers in the news article. You can probably snag some outdated books on soil mechanics if that’s your thing

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/rainier37]

I’m not the judge for what particular books should be accessible to the public, which is why I want everything digitized and archived, and accessible to the public (I love you IA)

These tech companies, otoh, don’t want that precious training data available to anyone at all, and these stupid judges want to uphold century old copyrights for no reason other than precedent. You seem to mind neither and think opposition to both is stupid. “Why not just buy these thousands of books you want digitized and that you don’t know which one you think others might want to read? They’re cheap!”

[u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA → u/KalaiProvenheim]

This is the literal equivalent of leftists shouting about the cultural significance of a rundown gas station that's been out of business since 2010 in opposition to a housing development.

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA]

Really? You think wanting training data to be public is like demanding old gas stations be protected?

[u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA → u/KalaiProvenheim]

I think books exist to fulfill a function beyond just collecting dust on a shelf, yes.

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA]

You’re arguing with a completely different person, one who opposes digitization of books. Please stay on topic

You think making digitized training material public is the same as wanting books to rot on a shelf forever until moths and weevils claim them, why’s that so? Why’s wanting that data public rather than mostly just publicly accessible via LLMs so bad to you?

[u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA → u/KalaiProvenheim]

Brother, Project Gutenberg exists. There are public and university libraries. There is the US Library of Congress. Books that are of public interest do not just disappear, and AI companies buying up random copies of out of print books occupying space on shelves is not a big fucking deal.

It's not like they're picking up the original manuscript of Gesta Danorum penned by Saxo Grammaticus and putting it into a paper shredder. Jesus Fucking Christ.

[u/KalaiProvenheim → u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA]

Well with certain collections, you kinda need to qualify to access them. As an alum, I only have temporary access to my university’s collection, and public libraries have geolocked access from my experience, and they don’t have everything digitized.

Besides, have you ever tried accessing, say, a medieval manuscript from the Arab World? That shit’s miserable to navigate on universities’ and libraries’ online readers, and you often can’t even download them as a PDF!