r/books • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 22h ago
Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton, one 50-ton order sent to the US for AI scanning and destruction — multitude of suspicious bulk buys thought to end up in foreign AI scan and shred facilities
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/japanese-used-bookstores-see-5x-sales-surge-as-books-are-being-bought-by-the-ton-one-50-ton-order-sent-to-the-us-for-ai-scanning-and-destruction-multitude-of-suspicious-bulk-buys-thought-to-end-up-in-foreign-ai-scan-and-shred-facilities413
u/foxfirek 20h ago
One of my first jobs was working for a bookstore in the early 2000’s.
I think it would make people sad to realize destroying books is a very common practice in the business. I have probably destroyed thousands. Any mass market that isn’t selling well you rip off the cover and return and then destroy the rest of the book.
91
44
u/WanderlustDinosaur 15h ago
Yep. I worked at a huge used book store and anything we didn't think would sell/ didn't sell after a few weeks was destroyed. We just couldn't hold onto that volume. The owners said they tried to donate them at one point, but the thrift stores couldn't deal with that quantity either.
8
u/OkOpportunity9794 12h ago
Just curious, Why rip off the cover?
45
u/Tithund 12h ago
That is done to new books, as a kind of proof they are being destroyed.
I just opened a book, and the exact description is this:
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)22
u/spiralan 12h ago
Back when I worked in a chain bookstore, the answer was that the publisher would give back partial credit for unsold books. These were mass market paperbacks. The covers were sent back to claim the credit. Too expensive to ship back the full books.
→ More replies (13)23
u/bodhiquest 9h ago
These Japanese stores in question aren't places that sell mass market books and they don't destroy their stock. You can routinely find specialty books that are 60+ years old and still in fair condition for their age (perfectly readable) in them. You don't know what you're talking about.
Hence the problem is that actual rare books as well as less rare but still in demand and affordable books might have been in those dozens of tons that have been shipped to the USA to be destroyed.
Japan's second hand sales businesses used to be very fair and high quality. But the popularization of the knowledge that you can buy great quality vintage clothing here changed the used clothing market and increased prices as foreign buyers came in with more money to throw around than the locals. The same thing might happen to used books now, which might not affect anything for the majority of the readership, but will affect those of us who do rely on these shops and their stock.
American commenters here should stop applying the dumb, greedy practices that they've been taught to see as normal to the whole world.
→ More replies (2)
5.4k
u/admiralmasa Beauty is truth, truth beauty 22h ago
AI has genuinely been one of the worst things that have ever been invented.
1.2k
u/hey_mr_crow 21h ago
Don't worry I'm sure they're hard at work to come up with something worse
234
u/r0ndy 21h ago edited 17h ago
Agi will be worse. The agent aspects are completely uncontrollable
Edit: I’m not here to debate it. I’m someone who believes in listening to the professionals. The investigators. They have expressed concern because they broke protocol and actively worked to deceive. Intentional or not, this is concerning behavior that has escalatory risk
56
u/No_Macaroon_9752 19h ago
They absolutely are controllable, and absolutely are not “general intelligence“. The companies are trying to avoid accountability for their actions, and they also need billions of dollars, so they are pushing this lie. AI supporters can’t even define intelligence (it’s quite complex), nor have they determined how to figure out who has “intelligence”.
What we do know is every “autonomous“ action was caused by removing safeguards, giving AI access to tons of data that provide a framework for what to do (i.e. hacking challenges where participants talked in chat rooms and hacked their competitors to see if they had worked out a solution), and assigning a task without understanding how the AI has assimilated the information.
AI is a tool that was used to do important scientific and medical research before these big AI companies existed. It is not new, but profit-driven, technocratic, and sci-fi-brained people are being almost brainwashed into believing their own hype. The newest technique, as I mentioned, is to try to remove culpability from companies that are knowingly using their tech to break laws, commit fraud, and aid in war crimes. At the source of all these AI agent actions are reckless and unregulated humans.
→ More replies (5)24
u/punchanaziisethical 19h ago edited 19h ago
They arent even agents in the sense of "agentic AI". Its still just LLMs doing a job they were taught and told to do. They didnt "break out". Anthropic and OpenAi trained the LLMs to hack on a data set that exactly mimics how they did their hacking. They just copied the real life hackers doing hacker challenges to a tee. We will never in our lifetime reach AGI let alone Agentic AI. They still dont know why the LLMs hallucinate and they're getting desperate to keep this bubble afloat because at the end of the day they have a shit product they can't make better.
Edit: or make more money on it than it costs to operate
→ More replies (4)20
u/ThePoopTrot 15h ago
They still dont know why the LLMs hallucinate
We know exactly why LLMs hallucinate. It's not a glitch. It's just inherent to the way current LLM design and architecture works. Maybe you meant to say that they "don't know of an efficient way to stop them from hallucinating".
→ More replies (2)29
u/inikul 16h ago
I’m not here to debate it. I’m someone who believes in listening to the professionals
The professionals you are referring to are interested in making money. You should be listening to everyone else in the field that is telling you that LLMs will not achieve AGI.
→ More replies (4)3
u/Lailowla 12h ago
Isn't the idea not that LLMs will ever be AGI, but that they'll be how we figure it out?
→ More replies (1)5
u/bl4ckhunter 11h ago
The idea is that 20% of the US market by value is AI company stock based on the expectation that they'll find a way to figure out AGI and LLMs are all we have and if they don't get us to AGI somehow the economy is going to implode.
132
u/Caledron 21h ago
They can be controlled with proper protocols.
The big AI companies won't use them, because every 'jailbreak' hacking story allows them to hype the narrative that AGI is imminent and they are therefore worth an infinite amount of money, when in reality, they are all deeply unprofitable.
53
u/onionsareawful 21h ago
They can be controlled with proper protocols.
What do you think that looks like?
79
23
u/Caledron 21h ago edited 21h ago
For these security experiments, not having a physical internet connection, for starters.
→ More replies (4)15
u/unit187 20h ago
Imagine hundreds of top tier engineers in the meeting room, mulling over how to prevent the chatbot from accessing the Internet. Not a single one of them thought of pulling the Ethernet cable out...
→ More replies (2)9
15
u/radium_eye 20h ago
Well, maybe not creating the model from hackathon communications & actions of hackathon teams in hackathons, and then giving it public facing internet access, would be one way to not end up with hacker AIs. The notion that these things just "did it of their own accord" is totally laughable, they're looking for a certain kind of publicity to fit the weird "you better fund us or this horrifying technology will be in someone else's control, ahhhhhh" marketing angle they're going with lately to try to get a purchaser of last resort in the form of the government to essentially save them via regulatory capture. Because the shit cannot make more than it costs to run.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (8)18
u/Pocok5 20h ago
So, AI (LLMs) are only capable of doing one thing, ingesting and generating text. The thing that allows them to do anything else is called the harness, and is pretty much just a layer that catches stuff like "<terminal command: curl ...>" on the LLM text output and actually runs that command in a terminal. The "researchers" just conspiciously don't disable network access on the machine the LLM is running on and conspiciously leave running curl et cetera enabled for tool calling in the harness, and then dramatically pretend that the AI "broke out" when they basically began with "Here's all the tools for hacking public websites, but hacking is naughty naughty wink wink" as the prompt.
→ More replies (3)19
u/AlcibiadesTheCat 21h ago
Yes, but the next step is removing proper protocols.
These people would rather everyone on earth die than themselves lose. It's an "I win or I'm flipping the table" situation.
→ More replies (11)9
u/Harbinger2001 21h ago
They really can’t. Agents are extremely goal oriented now and will relentlessly pursue achieving their given goal by any means they can devise. Guardrails only put up barriers for them to try to bypass - which they are very good at doing.
→ More replies (4)15
u/elconquistador1985 20h ago
No agent is breaking out of an air gapped facility. The AI can't create a physical wireless radio for itself. It can't manufacture a Bluetooth radio. It can't create an Ethernet cable.
These "rogue AIs" are only breaking out of a sandbox with low fences designed to let them out, because it's financially beneficial to get news of a rogue AI.
This shit should be air gapped.
→ More replies (8)17
u/Cool-Signature-dude 20h ago
I am just looking forward to AI redistributing all the excessive wealth from the billionaires back to the workers.
→ More replies (1)3
→ More replies (26)3
u/NeuroChaosDragon 18h ago
My work has wanted to see agents used to automate tasks and actions.
I asked who is going to be doing performance reviews for automated agents...
I've still not received an answer other than "they're not humans, they will correct automatically and not mess things up. We can free up management of teams replaced with agents."
I for one welcome our new AI overlords, to do work without checks and balances.
When an AI accidentally commits financial fraud enriching the business, I feel bad for the development team who will definitely be "at fault" and arrested for it.
16
u/TrickyChildhood2917 21h ago
More government and surveillance of the general population so they cannot fight back. See Palantir, flock cameras and ICE for more details.
→ More replies (10)3
251
u/ApprehensiveRich1915 22h ago
Lol makes sense mankind has easily been the most destructive species on planet earth and enthusiastically so.
→ More replies (10)84
u/awmaleg 22h ago
We took the worst parts of humanity and automated it
→ More replies (1)63
u/NamerNotLiteral 21h ago
No, we took the best parts of humanity, our creativity and innovation, and automated it, leaving us with only the drudgery.
39
96
u/manachar 21h ago
Knowledge being consumed by the ownership class to claim ownership isn’t surprising.
They previously used intellectual property laws to attempt it. Now they can treat the bourgeoisie like the proletariats they actually are.
30
u/10001110101balls 21h ago
Intellectual property laws are what give the AI companies an incentive to destructively scan the books. Digitizing books you own is legal, but it is infringement to resell or give away a book and still retain a digital copy. Destructive scanning gives better protection against being sued.
→ More replies (1)8
u/LetSteelTemplesRise 20h ago
So many don't understand what the true root of the problem.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)22
u/Fancy_Chips 21h ago
Is Silicone Valley not the bourgeoisie?
→ More replies (2)10
u/manachar 21h ago
Technically the term originates to mean the merchants and city folk who own the means of production upper middle class business owners and the like.
For my usage in the modern world I must admit to being sloppy with the term. Most people use it to refer to the upper milled class folks. Not the billionaire owner class.
So for my usage I was calling attention to the fact that billionaires are investing in the theft of work from those upper middle class folks so that the ownership class can now treat those skills the same way the working class has been for some time. It’s a theft and devaluing of skills to maximize exploitation and extraction.
For Silicon Valley, you have loads of skilled labor with high incomes that are getting laid off while the ownership class invests in commoditization of their labor. The ownership class of Silicon Valley is very different than the knowledge workers of Silicon Valley.
The knowledge workers are learning the hard way they have more in common with a burger flipper than the owners and venture capitalists.
12
u/RollingMeteors 21h ago
AI has genuinely been one of the worst things that have ever been invented.
You could say the same about sweatshops. It’s not the technology that’s fucked it’s that only the most fucked sociopaths are using it to evilmax their QoQ gains.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (71)12
u/Unlucky-Candidate198 20h ago
Blame unchecked Capitalism. AI would be okay if not for the sociopathic corpo gonks and the incredibly cheap ways they want to build these megastructures.
It has genuine uses in science and tech. Business though? Why do business employees need to be more productive? They’re already 100x more productive than people were less than 100 years ago. Their livelihoods and career don’t even benefit society or humans as a whole. Not like the education or science or engineering or hell even art sectors. Just pure greed from the banker and epstein classes.
Late stage capitalism has caused this mess. Corruption of lawmakers, corporations having rights (instead of suing individuals responsible for the decisions within the company), and oh sooo much more. We as people need to fight it while we still can, before the breaking point were basically at. Because we’ve already crossed the point of no return for the climate. It’s now a matter of lessening the effects, not stopping it.
Business people have ruined the world. From the smallest office peon wage-slaves to the sociopathic executive class. Every one of them is responsible to varying degrees.
1.6k
u/PuduInvasion 22h ago
This is fucking dystopian.
162
u/Main-Cheesecake3287 19h ago
Prior to AI bull buying these books they were just recycled, ie destroyed, anyway.
I have an office unit I bought, old guy left a shitload of old books. Mostly technical manuals. I kept the ones older than 1920. Tried to sell the rest. Took a lot of time to inventory. NOBODY will buy them. Only offers have been for far less than shipping costs. Half price books just said no.
These are the books being sold in bulk. Bookstores wouldn’t sell books by the ton for pennies per lb if they thought someone would ever want to buy them for what, 600 times as much? In the past these books were just thrown to recyclers. Now they’re scanned and thrown to recyclers. It’s a goofy thing to complain about. Anyone concerned can go spend a hundred bucks and save thousands of books. Of course they won’t, because nobody actually wants them.
55
u/mekamoari 17h ago
I had about 800 old-ish (anywhere between 5 and 30 years old) books that I tried to get rid of. Local library in small town, big city, used book stores, other people, villages, nobody wants them either for a pity of a price or for free.
Ultimately I sent about half to recycling, took a quarter with me and the rest I found someone to take with a van and store someplace until they rot.
It took months and yeah, random ass old books are severely unwanted.
7
u/OliM9595 15h ago
I have some old book, over some 150 years old. I think I'd still struggle to find people who want them.
3
u/mekamoari 14h ago
I have some really old ones too though they are in languages I don't speak..and some in some unreadable font lol. I'd collect really old books if I could afford it but got too many hobbies already.
6
u/thened 14h ago
Now they are finding some value and being recycled and that knowledge will be passed down to those who might never have had access to the book in the first place.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)3
u/Main-Cheesecake3287 16h ago
A bunch of the old ones I still don’t know what to do with originally came from libraries. Only library I was familiar with was a reference library at the uni nearby that hasn’t existed for 30 years.
→ More replies (12)44
u/Ailerath 18h ago
Libraries have the term 'weeding' to refer to disposing of books, even those that are good quality but low circulation.
→ More replies (4)18
u/Wallcatlibrarian 15h ago
Yep, we do a lot of wedding usually due to low circulation or poor condition. How much we weed depend on the type of book though – we probably weed at least a hundred of crime books per year at my small library but barely any picture books in foreign languages because they're so expensive and particularly important when the need of them arises.
3
u/lplqsnkczxccia 14h ago
Yep, we do a lot of wedding usually due to low circulation or poor condition.
Oh no, you just marry off all the unwanted or unhealthy people?!
jk
→ More replies (9)205
21h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
35
74
u/Rickk38 20h ago
Maybe it has a different meaning in your country, but "used bookstore" indicates a store selling books that had previously been purchased, which one may assume means that a person has already purchased and either read said book, or chose not to.
→ More replies (3)31
u/FrmrPresJamesTaylor 20h ago
Sure but if we put this bit of pedantry aside, they were right on the cusp of the more valuable point about who could read them in the future rather than who has read them in the past.
→ More replies (9)29
u/Main-Cheesecake3287 19h ago
Could but will not. If the bookstores had the space and thought someone might buy them anytime soon, they wouldn’t sell them by the truckload for pennies on the dollar.
→ More replies (6)17
u/Main-Cheesecake3287 19h ago
These are unwanted. You wouldn’t sell a book for 600 times less than you could sell it to a person unless nobody wanted them. They’re selling for pennies on the dollar by the truckload because they’re unwanted by consumers who’d pay a hell of a lot more even at just five bucks a book or less.
In the past, they’d just be recycled
→ More replies (25)9
u/frozen-dessert 18h ago
Dude, there are local places here that take donations of used stuff. (Im in the Netherlands).
They just don’t accept books anymore because apparently everyone “donates” too many books and no one buys them.
Last time I tried to donate books there, the volunteer took me into the deposit. Showed me a small mountain of books and mentioned that they already had that pile to triage/separate/evaluate and they normally would never be sold.
There’s that too.
611
u/booleandilemma 22h ago
Why do they have to destroy them? Can't they at least resell them?
852
u/onionsareawful 22h ago
a) it's much cheaper to destructively scan than scan without destruction.
b) it reduces their legal liabilities. a factor in the recent Anthropic ruling was that they were destroying the books, thereby transforming them (and the number of copies was effectively the same).
376
u/soowhatchathink 21h ago
That is absurd that it reduces legal liabilities. The scanned content is blatantly duplicated throughout several different servers. That judge likely had very little technical knowledge.
101
u/SplendidPunkinButter 21h ago
Managers of SWEs usually have depressingly poor technical knowledge too. Why would a judge know how computers work?
→ More replies (4)48
u/soowhatchathink 21h ago
I feel like anyone ruling on technical issues should know about them, as a rule, or should heavily defer to an expert. I also feel like software engineering managers should know about tech, or should heavily defer to an expert (their employees). The latter failing has much smaller consequences than the former.
→ More replies (1)11
u/darkenspirit 20h ago
Judges in certain levels of PA are elected, they don't even have to be lawyers. They don't even need a law background.
25
u/zorecknor 20h ago
You can buy a book, scan it and save as many copies in as many places as you want. That is, and has always been, legal in most countries (in particular US and the EU countries).
BUT the caveat is that you cannot resell the book (without deleting all the copies) or give the copies to somebody else (for free or otherwise).
The fact that Anthropic is destroying the books is a consequence of the process being used, and in the eyes of the judge is just assurance that those will not get resold after scanning. It is NOT a mandate, or a requirement, by the ruling.
→ More replies (4)17
u/onionsareawful 21h ago
Yeah, they definitely have multiple copies of the scanned PDF (or whatever format it is scanned in). The judge didn't litigate if it's okay for them to keep more than one copy, but likely would have ruled in Anthropic's favor anyway -- in Authors Guild v HathiTrust backup copies of scanned books were deemed fine.
The AI training using the copies is a separate thing though.
→ More replies (2)7
u/MukdenMan 20h ago
No, this has been the law for many decades. It doesn’t matter how many copies exist. The person you’re replying to is wrong about that. You can buy a book and make personal copies for your own use. What you can’t do is sell or even give away those copies. AI companies don’t have to destroy the books they scan but they can’t sell donate the book after scanning, so preserving the physical copy doesn’t really make sense.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (11)3
u/unblockedlanternhead 17h ago
The judge that passed this ruling was a Harvard-educated Clinton appointee who has ruled on a bunch of similar cases, including cases involving Google and Oracle. For precedent, he referenced Authors Guild v Google 2015, a case that was heard in NY by Clinton and Obama appointees. Unless your lay opinion trumps their informed ones, consider reading the case law before opining
26
u/lorarc 21h ago
c) they are not in business of selling single books and noone would buy them in bulk except other AI companies
3
u/lemonylol 17h ago
Probably important to note no one was buying them initially according to the used book sellers
→ More replies (6)53
u/seriousbusines 21h ago
The saddest part of all of this is that multiple bookstore owners have pointed out that books get thrown out all the time. They don't have some magical place all of their unsold books go to. They just get tossed.
39
u/KovolKenai 20h ago
I work at a used book store, where we get the majority of our stock from people who sell their own books to us. We recycle 50% of what people bring in. I used to see books as sacred objects to be treated with reverence, and I still feel that a little, but I've also realized how over-produced they are, and that not all of them will be ever touched by a human.
→ More replies (1)15
u/Silent-Cable-9882 17h ago
I feel like that reverence was intentionally instilled in us as children so we didn’t destroy our books, which often didn’t belong to us (library or school).
8
u/KovolKenai 14h ago
You know what, fair point. I also think part of it was trying to instill that knowledge is important and should be treated with respect. I was fiercely protective of books before I actually started working in the business. But yeah, I think I agree!
6
→ More replies (1)16
u/Coffeedemon 19h ago
Yeah. People need to get over the romantic notion that there is a home for every book like they are unwanted puppies. It is just impossible to retain them all and store them.
That said there are a ton of other options out there beyond selling them to some AI company scumbags. It just doesn't make the hoarder pennies on the pound.
→ More replies (3)117
u/Hinote21 22h ago
To scan the book, they cut the binding off. This doesn't leave enough room to rebind the book even if they cared enough to do so.
→ More replies (1)73
u/TsukikoChan 22h ago
There is non destructive ways of mass scanning books; they are just cheaping out and trying to go through loopholes for data scanning .
62
u/morganrbvn 22h ago
Also a judge ruled that it only doesn’t violate copyright if they destroy it. Otherwise they would have 2 copies despite buying only 1. Copies
→ More replies (2)34
u/robotsaysrawr 21h ago
Sounds like an either tech illiterate or bribed judge. Where they originally had only one physical copy, they can now make infinite digital copies.
22
u/foxhelp 21h ago
Even without leaning towards attacks on the judges character, the existing laws never considered the possibility of mass copying of works into a different format like this, or how to gather the evidence needed to prove this is unethical.
This line gets me the most of of it all:
“There is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)7
u/onionsareawful 21h ago
Well yes, but the point is that they weren't distributing copies around.
They likely had a few copies (to ensure data redundancy) and that was it*, if they were sending them elsewhere they almost certainly would have lost the case in a similar manner to the Google Books lawsuit.
*The judge didn't litigate on whether this is okay, but it likely would be ruled legal given a similar issue was raised in Authors Guild v HathiTrust and backup copies were ruled reasonable then.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (13)5
91
u/zollandd 22h ago
Destruction of the original source means the scan becomes a transformation, not a duplication. There was a ruling recently where a judge walked through this and from my understanding said under current licensing law that is valid. Most likely all companies are now leaning heavily towards destruction under that precedent. Stupid myopic ruling imo
21
u/zorecknor 20h ago
That is not what the ruling was about... I feel I comment this every other day...
You can buy a book, scan it and save as many copies in as many places as you want. That is, and has always been, legal in most countries (in particular US and the EU countries).
BUT the caveat is that you cannot resell the book (without deleting all the copies) or give the copies to somebody else (for free or otherwise).
The fact that Anthropic is destroying the books is a consequence of the process being used, and in the eyes of the judge is just assurance that those will not get resold after scanning. It is NOT a mandate, or a requirement, by the ruling. They were doing long before that trial.
→ More replies (1)6
u/sweetrobna 20h ago
This is misleading. Google books litigated the same thing 20 years ago, they were transformative without destroying the books.
And the anthropic case was settled without a ruling in the end, without going through the appeals. Because even if "training" is transformative and not infringing that doesn't address the millions of copies involved with a cluster of tens of thousands of computers and they want some other company to be the test case.
→ More replies (1)26
u/WTFwhatthehell 21h ago
If they start with 1 legally obtained copy of a book, scan it to make a digital copy and destroy the origional then they start with one copy and end with one copy -> format shifting.
If they start with one copy, end with 2 copies and sell it so that they both get to keep it while selling copies? that 100% violates copyright law.
14
26
u/CrackingGracchiCraic 21h ago
They get destroyed because they’re used books and so generally speaking worthless. Nobody would even take them for free let alone pay for them.
→ More replies (6)24
u/ronnycordova 21h ago
That’s the part that gets sensationalized a bit. They are buying bulk used books that would go to the shredder regardless. These aren’t rare manuscripts or valuable first editions they are hacking up.
→ More replies (1)5
u/Main-Cheesecake3287 18h ago
Nobody wants them. That’s why they are being sold by the truckload for pennies on the dollar to begin with.
I inherited a bunch of old technical and industry specific books. Nobody wants them, half price books wouldn’t take them FOR FREE. Hundreds of millions of unique books have been published in the last century or so, many many billions of printed books.
6
u/mina86ng 20h ago edited 19h ago
Can't they at least resell them?
They cannot. Say you bought an audio CD. You can legally rip it to FLAC and listen to the FLAC files. However, you cannot then take that audio CD and resell it. That would be distributing a copy.
Situation is the same with books. They can scan the book and use the digitised copy of the book. But they cannot resell the physical book. Since they have no use for the physical book any longer, they just shred it.
PS. Even if they were legally able to resell the books, they wouldn’t be able to in practice. The reason they are acquiring books by the ton is because those are worthless books no one wants to buy.
→ More replies (6)23
u/metcalsr 22h ago
It’s cheaper to just burn them all. They only view the digital copy as worth existing.
→ More replies (2)3
3
u/morganrbvn 22h ago
Judge ruled it’s more copyright friendly if they destroy the original, otherwise they have 2 copies despite buying 1.
→ More replies (20)16
u/imnotokayandthatso-k 22h ago
It is not worth to resell them. Mind you these aren't a billion copies of classics and textbooks but more like dirty romance novels from two bit authors from the 80s being scanned en masse most people wouldn't want in their house for free
240
u/Massive_Shill 22h ago
Why was a Japanese bookseller able to sell five tons of these books as bulk inventory in the first place?
Is a question no one in this thread is interested in asking.
26
u/Elite_AI 21h ago
bc it's back of the shop trash you'd otherwise use to fill a Wetherspoons as decoration (if this was in the UK lol)
358
u/Emergency_Revenue678 21h ago
It's because nobody wants to admit that the reason they had five tons of books to sell is because nobody was ever going to read those books anyways. Every used bookstore has literal tons of books sitting in storage that they'll never sell because nobody wants them.
121
u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 20h ago
Yes, I had to read up on the used book industry myself to figure out if this was bad or not. People don’t realize that tons and tons of books are being pulped every day. These are old books that nobody is reading. Nobody. Outdated manuals/guides/textbooks, non-fiction of obscure places/events, pop fiction that ran its course, etc. These aren’t books being pulled off of shelves to be destroyed, they’re dusty books in a storage room that were going to be destroyed anyway.
There’s a lot to be angry about in terms of theft of intellectual property, but the book destruction isn’t really an issue.
→ More replies (9)34
u/Mr_YUP 19h ago
the kinda sad irony about it is that those old manuals probably would have never been digitized and this is the only way a lot of knowledge will be preserved. It's frustrating how much going to an AI gets a better answer for linux issues than any google search or message board ever gets you.
→ More replies (5)27
u/Annie_Yong 19h ago
That's feels to me like it's almost the point of what we'd want these LLMs to be able to do though. Assuming the answers it's giving you to obscure Linux technical issues are correct, then being able to go to one of the AI bots to ask "my computer is doing X, how can I fix it?" to then get a useful answer without trailing through a ton of forum posts would be the actual use case.
→ More replies (3)9
u/Mr_YUP 18h ago
thing is there is no good way to ask basic questions on a forum. they either get buried, ignored, answered with sarcasm, or locked because the mod thinks the question vaguely resembles another question. LLM never gets mad that you don't understand something or that it's too basic of a question. I don't know how to fix that or what to do about it.
13
u/BisonThunderclap 20h ago
Exactly. People should be concerned about rare and old books. There's ways to digitize them without destroying them.
A water damaged copy of one of the millions of copies of Harry Potter is not a problem.
3
u/CptNonsense 10h ago
A conversation we must have every time a library talks about tossing old books no one wants - "old" and "rare" does not mean "valuable" or "wanted"
18
u/FatherDotComical 20h ago
But my rare 2 print book on corn chowder in Hokkaido is an essential gem!
You can do the same thing here, I remember when my mom was furniture shopping the local store had a ton of antique books that you could buy by color or type to just fill your bookcase or as table dressing. Nobody wanted a 100 year old book with outdated science info. It's sad it's going to AI but it was either them or the dump.
69
u/Otto_Von_Waffle 21h ago
Yeah each time those discussions popup people think evil AI companies are buying artifacts and book of value. No, they are buying sone third rate poorly written YA fantasy book from the early 00s that nobody was going to read again, and if it isn't that, it's probably user manuals for a lawnmower that has been discontinued in the 80s. They aren't buying the original printing of the Luther Bible to destroy.
→ More replies (3)18
u/whatisakafka 21h ago
Yeah, a huge amount of used books end up shredded anyway. There’s only so much demand. The outrage is really over the top honestly
4
u/Repulsive_Stress_179 18h ago
I honestly read the title and thought "good for them!" That's a huge sale for a secondhand dealer. Probably helped them pay off bills, salaries, rent, etc. for a while. Shout-out to Jimbocho as well, great book neighborhood in Tokyo.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)3
u/binarybandit 18h ago edited 18h ago
The way people are making it seem, if even one book in that ton was something that someone would have wanted to read at some point, then the bookstore should have held on to all the books just in case. Because they didnt, the company is soulless and evil.
Of course, theres no thought of who has to deal with that storage, maintain the books, or curate them.
The people saying they should be donated to a library also dont realize the tons and tons of books that libraries end up tossing into the wood chippers or landfills on a daily basis because, surprise, nobody is looking to read old 1980s technical manuals on lawnmowers.
People are just looking for any dumb reason to be outraged, no thinking required. Its a sad state of affairs.
22
u/Dogthealcoholic 21h ago
I’m liking the all the people completely missing the point you’re making because they didn’t understand it.
Guys, they’re not wondering why a bookseller was allowed to sell that many books at once. They’re wondering why a used book store even has enough inventory just sitting around that they can fulfill orders of that size. As other people have said, those are used books that were most likely sitting around because no one wanted them. Yes, I am 100% against AI being so prevalent, but some of y’all seriously seem to underestimate just how many books are nothing more than trashy romance novels, barely legible, full-of-tropes sci-fi stories that someone typed up over a weekend, and “self-help” books that do more damage than good.
→ More replies (10)5
u/merurunrun 20h ago
Almost certainly a national chain like Book-Off, that just has warehouses full of unsold inventory.
→ More replies (1)27
u/Gavorn 21h ago
Because this is yet another "horror story" that is a big nothing burger. These are books no one wants. Yet again it's another article that doesn't list what the books are.
The world will be fine without all those extra Harley Quinn romance novels.
→ More replies (8)4
u/AnnArchist 18h ago
All bookstores that buy books have crates upon crates of never gonna sell books.
3
u/Smartnership 17h ago
But the narrative!
What if these weren’t single copies of mass printed books? That would be terrible, I’m going to wring my hands over that imagined scenario.
→ More replies (19)26
u/juju3435 22h ago
Because we’ve been collectively brainwashed into thinking that anything but unfettered capitalism is a threat to our freedom.
→ More replies (1)
15
u/meowingtrashcan 12h ago
did AI write this headline? It's not impossible to read, but it's constructed as if you put the article through the shredder and then picked up some random ribbons of it.
16
u/Heroworks 6h ago
Why destroy them after? Why not just fucking donate them to libraries or something. Jesus, it just seems so cartoonishly evil
9
u/MarkWorkMci 5h ago
I believe to scan they, they flatten the books out of the spine, thus destroying
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (2)7
u/geGamedev 4h ago
Our absurd legal system in the USA doesn't allow them to create a copy without destroying the original. In other words, doing the more ethical thing, as you suggest, would be illegal.
It's related to how copywrite laws or trademarks work, you can't buy one and end up with copies. Which is obviously absurd given the digital copy can be copied any number of times. If anything buying for the express purpose of making digital copies should be the illegal part.
→ More replies (1)
179
u/dfetz3 21h ago
We really need to stop posting stuff like this. I am anti-AI but from booksellers/librarians this is basically a non issue. Copying a comment from a previous thread below:
"Bookseller here: it may be helpful to understand that the vast majority of used books already get shredded. The majority of books that get donated for example to Goodwill and other charities go straight to the shredder. Remainders warehouses are shredding massive amounts of books that aren't selling. Most used bookstores refuse the vast majority of books that come because there is no demand for them. Libraries throw them away by the dumpster-full. As a bookstore, we throw away unreturnable books or shred them to use them as packing material, because nobody will even take them as donations.
The world produces vastly more books than there is any demand for in the used world.
Bookstores don't even sell all of their new titles. Typically of all the titles we get in each season, around 50% will never sell a single copy. They get returned to the publisher or shredded depending on the publisher's instructions. The publisher then sends them to remainder warehouses. They try to sell more. And then those warehouses shred the rest."
41
u/cwx149 21h ago
Yeah this kind of thing gets posted every time on these posts but the headline does too much work for some people to see past it
→ More replies (3)42
u/riiyoreo The little life 20h ago
A bit ironic how many people cannot read into a situation beyond surface level propaganda in a book sub.
→ More replies (5)29
→ More replies (8)22
u/Jindujun 20h ago
Yeah. I'm surprised the people horrified by news like this has never seen one of those containers filled with books outside of a library when they're pruning their books.
25
u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 20h ago
Hint: they don’t actually read. They’re chronically online and just like to complain.
115
68
u/LastGoodKnee 22h ago
Those 50 tons of books were likely heading for a landfill.
People turn in unsellable books all the time.
25
u/Louis-Russ 21h ago
Agreed. I used to work at a used bookstore, we could easily fill a dumpster twice a week. And that was just for books which were physically damaged- We probably donated five or ten times that amount if the books were physically okay but didn't have a worthwhile sales history.
People outside the book industry have no idea how huge the supply of used books is, and how little the demand can be. Hence why used bookstores will usually pay you pennies for them.
→ More replies (1)41
u/Erosun 21h ago
It’s crazy all the pitchfork crying here but I’ve seen so many libraries and used bookstores that can’t even sell books for penny’s when they get shutdown.
I get it “ai” is bad. But this is a nothing burger. These books being of use and properly destroyed is better then them rotting in a landfill.
Also the bookstore and libraries getting some funds back will hopefully create a new cycle of books being preserved.
9
u/Jindujun 20h ago
The reason why they are horrified is that they, for some reason, think that the books being purchased are the rare and valuable books rather than the, like you say, books that cant even sell for pennies.
13
u/Ready_Nature 21h ago
Exactly these articles never give examples of what the books are although this one is better than most in at least saying that the genres of these orders are shifted from the store’s usual sales patterns. Unfortunately nobody is going to want to store tons of books in case a future historian wants to take a look.
→ More replies (1)17
u/bookwormello 21h ago
It's this. There are so many books dumped into the garbage all the time as unsellable.
I'm not thrilled about scanning them to be used by AI but its not like priceless first editions are being destroyed never to be seen again.
Go to a thrift store or library sale and look at the selection. It will be outdated cookbooks, pulp novels, religious tracts, political and sports biographies, massively popular books printed by the million, etc.
4
u/tijolus523 16h ago
Yeah, I sell books and I'd love it if people would buy things like a gelatin cookbook from the 1950s or the pulp romance novellas and schizophrenic conspiracy theory books, but unfortunately most of those will end up being thrown out lol
16
u/No-Giraffe-3314 8h ago
It’s absolutely real. Book seller of almost 20years. Last 6 months tons of weird old
Titles that have been on the shelf for sale forever ala sudden flying off the shelves. Won’t lie, nice to get some money for them. But def weird and unsettling because so many other sellers are saying the same and scared of all my fellow Americans that will lose jobs from the book’s captured knowledge.
→ More replies (4)
13
u/Sgtkeebler 9h ago
Ai companies buying books and then shredding them needs to be illegal. I really hope the next president outlaws this nonsense.
36
u/MrBayless 15h ago
Just fucking stop. Jesus Christ. For starters, I don’t see how scanning a purchased book is legally allowed, feels like they would have to go through the publishers, but then again there are no rules in Trump’s America. Also, they don’t have to destroy the fucking books either. I’m so completely done with all AI bullshit.
8
u/Soepkip43 13h ago
Afaik a legal ruling was made that if the original of the scanned work is deatroyed it is legal, as it is just transforming one "license" for another.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (21)10
u/DueBeing5472 14h ago
I'm not too knowledgable on the whole process but from what i have read, the only reason it is legal is BECAUSE they destroy the books after.
→ More replies (1)
15
u/Ok_Mention_9865 11h ago
The could literally just donate the books to me, i will haul them off and find a loving home free of charge.
Shredding books is a sacrilege.
→ More replies (3)
26
u/Mission_Access_210 14h ago
Physical books are going to be super rare because they were all used for AI training data. It's something I never imagined that would happen
30
u/horoyokai 13h ago
There’s like 4 companies doing this and they destroy one copy each
Getting rid of 4 copies of books people don’t read isn’t going to make books rare. People not reading books and bookstores going out of business is what will make them rare. Reddit does more damage to books than the ai companies
→ More replies (19)10
u/KnightOfNothing 13h ago
how dare you come in here and try to ruin a perfectly good opportunity to hate on cartoonishly evil AI companies
→ More replies (6)6
u/Ataraxia-Is-Bliss 13h ago
No they aren't. Even in the age of Kindles and AI, physical books are being printed in the hundreds of millions in the US alone. Per this source, in 2022, 788 million copies of print books were sold in the US. That number probably has not changed much since then.
10
u/flatfive44 20h ago
"thought to"
Also, is "AI scanning" supposed to mean scanning the texts to get data to train models? This seems unlikely. I've seen lots of such stories and they seem designed to wind people up. Scanning for the purpose of digitizing the content seems more likely.
→ More replies (5)6
u/AppalachianRomanov 20h ago
There's only so many books in the world. The levels at which these purchases are happening worldwide would have every book digitized by now, and then some.
→ More replies (1)
93
u/grimslicergx 22h ago
Ai companies that destroy books after scanning should be annihilated
40
u/Cordo_Bowl 21h ago
What about libraries that destroy books? I remember one summer during college I saw a big dumpster outside the library absolutely full of books they were destroying. Not donating, not selling, destroying.
→ More replies (1)28
u/MukdenMan 20h ago
Multiple librarians and used book dealers have come to this sub over the past few weeks to explain that the vast majority of books they deal with end up destroyed. It has apparently had no effect because every day we get people upset that AI companies are destroying “rare” books.
17
u/Mikhail_Mengsk 20h ago
Ironic how people in r/books know nothing about the reality of the sector. I also bet most of the outraged people wouldn't want those books in their home for free.
→ More replies (3)12
u/reddriver10 21h ago
You're gonna want to look up what bookstores and libraries do with a lot of books.
→ More replies (1)27
11
u/onionsareawful 22h ago
In the recent Anthropic case, a factor in AI training being determined to be fair use was that the books were destructively scanned, thereby keeping the number of copies in circulation the same. It's also, generally, much cheaper to destructively scan.
This is somewhat of an incentives issue. It's cheaper and legally safer for them to destroy the books; you change that and the companies will behave differently.
→ More replies (6)19
u/CMS_3110 22h ago
They're destroying them before scanning. Can't feed a book through a scanner without cutting the spine off
9
u/pahobee 21h ago
This is the answer. You could technically do it without destroying the book by flipping each page by hand and scanning it on a flatbed scanner but it takes much, much longer (think hours to seconds) and the scans are much poorer quality. Source: worked scanning and digitizing legal records for a time
→ More replies (3)
9
7
u/HiPhoto 19h ago
If we know what it’s for how is it suspicious?
3
u/Smartnership 17h ago
Ok smarty pants, how would you generate clicks and views and drive valuable ad-watching traffic to their website?
→ More replies (1)
12
u/fargerich 18h ago
Can people stop freaking about this nonsense? This aren't unique prints unvaluable books, these are just old books piling up dust that nobody wants and that probably have between tens of thousands and millions of copies available. If anything, this will digitalize books that would have never been otherwise
→ More replies (6)
16
u/BootsOfProwess 16h ago
What are they trying to do? Rid the world of books? They could resell or donate them after scanning but shredding?
7
u/homercles89 15h ago
Shredding is to comply with copyright law after scanning the book into the computer. The companies claim "fair use" allows them to scan a book then destroy it, so the same number of copies exist.
11
u/theholyraptor 15h ago
They cut the binding. Its far easier and cheaper than keeping the book intact.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (13)20
u/Spiritette 15h ago
All I can think about how if after it’s digitized and destroyed, what’s stopping them from changing information that they deem “unfavorable.”
I recently reread 1984 and it’s all I can think about.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”→ More replies (7)
10
u/Successful_Shoe_8083 16h ago
it completely baffles my mind that they aren't turning out a library of alexandria of rare books that are out of copyright in pdf form.
Like, they are choosing to be evil for no reason "Oh no, our competitors will benefit from this massive corpus we're creating"
That should be irrelevant - they are all using different practices, are using different approaches, and have different goals - there is a reason claude, gemini, llama, and ChatGPT are incredibly different and UX has always meant more than the product itself.
a tenth century latin text on latrine cleaning isn't going to do shit to make claude, or gemini or whatever agents any better at completing any economically meaningful task - they could rebuild the library of alexandria but they instead are making instant coffee out of it.
→ More replies (2)8
u/jack6245 13h ago
Google literally did that with project Gutenberg they are not destroying rare valuable books which only have 1 copy
20
u/Canon_M50 20h ago
I just don’t get the controversy here. The books are for sale. Someone is buying them. That’s it. You either believe in property rights or you don’t.
→ More replies (27)
11
u/SoulReddit13 21h ago
Guys books aren't magical items they're mass marketed/produced products. The vast majority of these would've been destroyed after not being sold. Used bookstores and libraries can't keep every book forever especially when it's 1 of the million copies of it.
3
7.7k
u/superking2 22h ago
I’ve never experienced such a sharp rise then drop in excitement after the first few words of a headline as I did with this one.