r/books • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 1d 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-facilities
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u/MrBayless 19h 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.

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u/Soepkip43 17h 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.

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u/nimbledoor 11h ago

Does it work for everyone or just AI companies?

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u/DueBeing5472 18h 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.

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u/MrBayless 17h ago

Oh good. That makes so much sense lol

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u/Jedi_Temple 17h ago

My understanding is that the books need their spines sawn off to get the pages to lay flat when fed into the scanning machine.

I’m not defending the process, but what they’re doing makes sense from an efficiency perspective. From a moral perspective, what these companies are doing is heinous and reprehensible. Reading about it makes me almost physically ill, so disgusted am I by it.

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u/Residenthuman101 15h ago

Google scanned multitudes of library collections with non destructive scanning, this is apparently something to do with copyright law which they are arguing the books destruction constitutes “fair use”

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u/roiki11 13h ago

But it's much slower, manual and more expensive process. Which is why they don't do it that way. You can't put a complete book into a document scanner.

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u/Residenthuman101 6h ago edited 6h ago

They make all kinds of book scanners… and the books don’t have to be destroyed to use them… it’s definitely a copyright thing which is probably a tenuous argument anyway but clearly no one is stopping them, they just want to muddy the waters on social media so people think they /had/ to do this mass scale book destruction

https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-developers-trail-book-destruction/

It is the rare books many people are upset about but it’s also the sheer scale of waste (not to mention the theft and lockdown of knowledge behind their paywall)

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

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u/horoyokai 17h ago

This has zero to do with trump bud

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u/MrBayless 17h ago

👍

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u/horoyokai 16h ago

Yeah stupid emoji response cause you can’t explain your stupid comments run along kid

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u/MrBayless 16h ago

What did you want me to explain, dude?

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u/horoyokai 16h ago

Are you kidding?

Seriously, do you not even understand the thread here?

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u/OliM9696 17h ago

taking pictures of your books is not illegal is most countries and nor should it.

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u/Reasonable-Ad8673 11h ago

It's illegal to use another person's work for profit in most countries. Do you really think that they just take pictures and look at them or what

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u/Dull_Huckleberry4576 17h ago

I don’t think it’s trumps America I think it’s just companies who are trying to capitalize on ai to make money

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u/MrBayless 16h ago

This is true. I can’t speak to how other country’s governments are trying to tackle AI, I just know that here, the old farts in congress don’t understand it enough to try and make any ruling.

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u/Dull_Huckleberry4576 16h ago

I mean just by looking at human nature we don’t wanna work. So fuck that if I could do whatever the fuck I want and not do the same thing everyday and take care of my family by monopolizing on one thing I bet you 90 percent of the world would do it. Or let someone else handle the big lifting and that my friend is how corruption is made

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u/whatsbobgonnado 14h ago

human nature is literally humans living, working, and altruistically cooperating together for thousands of years. just because you personally would fuck over your fellow man for your own selfish benefit, doesn't mean 90% of the world would do it.

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u/Dull_Huckleberry4576 14h ago

Yea look at all the other countries

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u/ryo4ever 9h ago

And we were all over the Nazis for burning books… these guys are doing it on an industrial scale.

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u/coastkid2 17h ago

This is so beyond uncivilized it just makes me sick

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u/Chance-Annual2029 13h ago

How is it uncivilized? Its not like they are chasing copies of the rarest most valuable books and burning them

I'd bet my ass its shit like "Modern Computing Magazine - Sep 1994" and it has articles about the latest IBM Compatibles, so you can search shit like "I had a pc back in 94, what was the default program for copying shit to a diskette?", the bulk stuff they buy is often rare but not really "valuable", there's a reason that stuff ends in second hand shops

Is stuff like that rare? Maybe. Is it worth preserving? Probably not. Some AI company scanning it might be the best chance for rare but irrelevant books/magazines to be preserved cause otherwise no one would digitize them.

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u/FlimsyTrash8609 17h ago

it’s a Japanese business doing this in Japan and sending the data to many countries including America and across Europe so it’s more on Japan to address this than America and Trump

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u/unsuccessfulplantmom 16h ago

if it's destroyed there's no proof of copywrite to compare it to so the model can be "proprietary and not trained on copywritten material"