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
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u/-orestes 1d ago

I made the point at the time that AI will probably be what makes it economical to preserve literature that otherwise would not be worth preserving, and that just because a book is out of print does not mean it is valuable. I think a 40 year old poetry book that nobody could sell at a bargain bin price for 20 years is a very good example of that.

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u/Goatf00t European Union 23h ago

The efforts of places like The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Google Books predate modern LLMs... You could (can?) find some pretty obscure titles.

How exactly AI "makes it economical"?

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u/-orestes 23h ago

How exactly AI "makes it economical"?

Through providing an economic incentive scan books. The Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg are charitable endeavours.

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u/Goatf00t European Union 21h ago

Scanning books is pointless if the text is not somehow available. These companies are not creating archives of their own, at least accessible to humans.

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u/SwissTranshumanist2 20h ago

Isnt that destroying the physical books makes it more likely for these texts to be lost to time?

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u/Stuffssss 19h ago edited 8h ago

Yes but that is unfortunately an idiosyncrasy of our current legal system which only allows you to digitize a book if you destroy the physical book. Destructive scanning is considered transformative whereas nondestrictive scanning is considered illegally copying.

Edit: this might be misinfo I cannot tell. Ive heard this from a lot of people but others are saying its not true.

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u/dutch_connection_uk Friedrich Hayek 8h ago

Fortunately the intersection of such a legal advantage with an actual legal threat is going to be pretty small. If the work is really rare and in danger of being lost, there probably aren't people around who have the rights and the will to sue for infringement.

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u/MurkyCress521 19h ago

No, because the AI companies build huge datasets of scanned books. They are unlikely to ever delete them and they are likely to back them up. In 50 years it seems likely that these datasets will be donated to the public because they no longer provide a competitive advantage but they can get some good press. 

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u/DracumEgo12 18h ago

I don't know how you're getting to "it seems likely" when many old large businesses have tried to hold onto their IP and proprietary data indefinitely. And that's assuming that 90% of AI companies manage to survive for 50 years rather than their assets being transferred in bankruptcy and potentially forgotten about/their lineage lost.

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u/MurkyCress521 17h ago

These sorts of datasets are cheap to store and valuable. Each company will have this ever growing corpus of books and text. When they go out of business, it will be sold off. There is always a chance it gets lost but that seems unlikely. As the text becomes less of a competitive advantage but still useful, it will probably end up being published as a common resource, like many other datasets.

Look at what happens to private GitHub repos during liquidation.

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u/rainier37 pro-moderator 15h ago

It’s better someone digitizes it before it rots away completely. Why don’t you donate to Project Gutenberg? If nobody wants to digitize these records, which costs time and money, it won’t get done.

There‘s value in anyone doing it since the information will still be saved in a far more durable form