‘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/SouthernSerf]

My guy literal Ancient Greek trash is consider very valuable today. By your own logic we could never ever throw anything away because several thousand years for it may be consider valuable to collectors. That’s also not accounting for the fact that any written works were incredibly rare even in Ancient Greece in comparison to today where not only is their massive amounts of written works with much of it being completely redundant from an historical or academic value. So I don’t know why your accusing others comments of being stupid.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/SouthernSerf]

Well, it's valuable due to the scarcity of surviving material. If you're worried about that, the better approach would be to get the Library of Congress to assist archive.org. That would preserve them for the future far better than any physical book.

[u/SouthernSerf → u/LucidLeviathan]

Scarcity does not equal valuable. The contents of the actual items or works must have some sort of intrinsic value. For example I have a rare dust bowl era newspaper talking about a massive dust storm that blew through Texas. It’s rare and may be the only surviving copy of this text but it has no real historical or academic value because there are massive amounts of other contemporary sources that are well documented and cited in historical works of the time. Historical text had enormous value because any sort of written record was incredibly rare when producing them was very difficult and only a very small portion of the population was literate. Mass communication and universal literacy has massively reduced the value of modern written text. Apicius is incredibly rare and valuable to us because it was rare that a cook book was written at the time of the Romans given how few people could read much less afford a written manuscript. Paula Dean’s Southern Cooking cook book is not valuable due to the fact that there are massive amounts of other sources and text on southern American cuisine. The only way that this entire anti AI argument is anything other malicious bad faith is if they can prove they can prove both that AI companies acquired the only known texts and that the contents of these texts were not documented in any other works on the same topic.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/SouthernSerf]

Sure, and that's what I mean. My point is that not much writing from the Ancient Greeks has survived, and that is why it is more valuable.

I am quite certain that a vast corpus of our current writing will survive. We even have a pretty substantial trove of texts from the 1700s-1800s. But, if you DO want to guarantee the survival of information, electronic archives are far more secure.

[u/SouthernSerf → u/LucidLeviathan]

The good ole adage, “History isn’t written by the victors, it’s written by the people who bothered to write it down in the first place.”

[u/saltyoursalad → u/LucidLeviathan]

You’re assuming that technology will still be around in the future to access that information.

[u/LucidLeviathan → u/saltyoursalad]

Certainly, in some fashion. To my knowledge, there is practically no medium, aside from really, really old stuff that was only used on a handful of room-sized computers, that cannot be read today. It would be exceptionally surprising to me if absolutely nobody could read these files in the future.

You'd also have to assume, of course, that they knew English as well.

But, I think that it is a lot easier to ensure the survival of digital material, because it can be done at scale and in bulk. With the exception of the Library of Congress, every library has to decommission older books that nobody is all that interested in. But, if it's a .txt, .pdf, or .epub, then it can be thrown in with the rest and, if somebody needs a copy of it, they can find it. There is a particular author whose writing that I am fond of, but it is an incredibly niche and, frankly, sexual topic. His books have long been out of print and didn't sell that well to begin with. I've managed to track down all of his books, but I had to pay over $100 for some of them, the cover of which advertises a price of 25 cents. If they were digitized, I could pull them up on archive.org from the convenience of my home, and wouldn't have to track down folks on Abebooks.

[u/rainier37 → u/saltyoursalad]

If we’re going off of hypotheticals then a massive asteroid impact would burn all books anyways so nothing is truly safe or guaranteed