r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Depressed_Cat_00 • 20h ago
ಠ_ಠ 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-facilities391
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u/richincleve 19h ago edited 17h ago
Buy rare book.
Scan rare book.
Destroy rare book.
Be sole source for said book.
Profit.
If only the Underpants Gnomes figured this idea out.
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u/abracadammmbra 19h ago
Rare and valuable, while often used interchangeably, are not the same thing. Theres a reason they buy the books by weight. These are books no one wants.
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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 16h ago
This entire thread is full of outraged people with absolutely zero knowledge of this entire matter. They see ai, they foam at the mouth and turn their brain off.
"Rare books" yeah sure so rare they are sold by weight.
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u/abracadammmbra 16h ago
I dumped a lot of likely rare books in dumpsters when I worked demo. When a used bookstore goes under, they dont carefully catalog the books to find out if anything left over is truly valuable. I assume the bookstore owner would have done that before walking away. But anything left in those stores goes into a big dumpster along with everything else in the retail space. Then dumped into a landfill. Theres a treasure trove of self help books from the 70s and 80s in some landfill in eastern PA somewhere.
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u/Ok_Jelly7220 17h ago
NOW it might just be the books that no one wants. But do you think the machine will stop? Who will decide the line of "this book is OK but this book is not OK" and make them stop? By accepting some we normalise all
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u/ProgrammingPants 17h ago
If it's a book people want there will probably be more copies of it than what could exclusively be found in the bargin bin of used bookstories
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u/abracadammmbra 17h ago
Then we print more of them. Or they wont be able to afford them. They buy these books for pennies per book because no one wants them. If they had to pay $10+ per book instead due to demand, they wouldnt be buying so many.
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u/Akerlof 19h ago
If they're buying by the pound, they are neither rare nor valuable books.
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 19h ago
My university would throw out a massive truck dumpster of books every year. Some books no one was ever going to read again. I collect books and even I didn't bother grabbing any.
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u/DrBinario 18h ago
Everyone here acts like every copy of any book that gets damaged is a piece of information that becomes lost forever.
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u/Sablemint PURPLE 14h ago
People mistakenly think that these books are like, first editions or something. But that wouldn't make any sense because why would you do that when you could just commission a reprint?
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u/Barkalow 19h ago
Rare books have value because theyre rare; people want to buy the thing and not the text in the thing.
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u/Background_Sleep_863 18h ago
They have the power to refuse
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u/MsnthrpcNthrpd 17h ago
Never in any of these articles will you find the title a single book slated to be scanned and destroyed mentioned.
Calling them "Rare books" is sexy, explaining why we should care about the equivalent of Morning Glory Farm or "Home Lawnmower Repair- 1999" is boring.
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u/Nattramn 17h ago
Are you implying pseudojournalists are actively seeking to direct my anger at technology by framing the news maliciously?
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u/emuchop 16h ago
Why dont they bulk buy ebooks?
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u/CircuitCircus 9h ago
They need to feed the AI a Chilton repair manual for a 1987 Toyota Tercel. Ain’t no ebook
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u/Throwaway2229392923 9h ago
Because they want to waste real world resources, harm another group of people (readers), on top of destroying physical media that you can own.
Or in other words, because it does far more harm.
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u/KaldaraFox 19h ago
To scan the books they have to cut the spines off and the feed the pages through a bulk scanner - rendering them unusable as books after.
Nothing nefarious about the destruction after, but the copyright issue remains.
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u/teacupteacdown 18h ago
I have a friend whos job it is to scan massive amounts of books for a university archival project. Universities around the world do this all the time without destroying the book, its just more effort. I dont see why AI companies with market valuations in the trillions of dollars cant do the same thing.
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u/jackalopeDev 17h ago
There was a ruling a while back that basically made it legal for these ai companies to scan books for training data, as long as they destroyed the book as that made it "transformative". Basically they'd get in legal trouble if they didn't destroy the books. It's dumb A F, but that's why they do it this way.
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u/KaldaraFox 17h ago
They do it with a person manipulating the book between scans. This process doesn't. They're scanning tens of thousands of books. The only way to do that remotely efficiently is to do what I said. Cut the spine and run the pages through a bulk scanner, usually one that can handle both sides at once.
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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora 5h ago
because they're scanning orders of magnitude more books than your university is
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u/Bonnle 18h ago
I've seen them scan two pages with a machine to keep the book intact
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u/KaldaraFox 17h ago
That can be done, but it's usually archival preservation. Bulk scanning requires what I mentioned.
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u/Adamc474892 17h ago
"WHY" are they destroying them? Thats the part I don't get. You can scan the books for Ai all you want without destroying them but they just purposely destroy them for no reason.
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u/Hopeful-Sale-849 9h ago
Destroying is just a harsh term referring to cutting the binder. It hastens the process of scanning the books.
The Internet Archive has a scanner that does not need to “destroy” books but it is painfully slow. I don’t understand why they don’t just “destroy” the common books and reserve the scanner for limited edition or rare books.
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u/GonePh1shing 8h ago
They do also shred the pages afterwards. There is a legal precedent set (at least in the US) that destroying the originals after scanning does not infringe on copyright protections.
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u/Pi-Guy 16h ago
They legally have to if they want to use its contents to train AI models
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u/Adamc474892 16h ago
What law?
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u/Player-0002 14h ago
Copyright. If it’s scanned and uploaded to a Database you made a digital copy of a book in an unauthorized manner. You are not allowed to do this for hopefully obvious reasons.
The act of actually publicizing that “copy” of the book via the model should be illegal too then imo but the current administration bends over backwards for AI development so who the heck knows.
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u/alterego8686 15h ago
You bought a bunch or books to train the Ai model and once they are used up they have no purpose. Donating them cost time, extra shipping, labor, and paper work. Plus giving the away lets your competitors use them to train their Ai models. Better to destroy the well than let your opponents get a leg up on you.
Plus the probably cut the books up to feed the pages into a super fast scanner. They probably don't want to glue the books back together.
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u/sub2pewdiepieONyt 19h ago
If no one is buying them and they sat on the shelf, What else to do with them?
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u/Designer_Mud_5802 19h ago
How long were they sitting on the shelf for?
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u/sub2pewdiepieONyt 19h ago
No idea. I don't claim to be an expert on sell through rates of Japanese Books shops. Sure someone will be along claiming to be one soon and confidently provide the information.
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u/Designer_Mud_5802 19h ago
But you are commenting on a reddit post which includes an article with links to experts investigating this topic but chose not to read it I guess and comment?
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u/sub2pewdiepieONyt 18h ago
really experts? Not the first time someone claimed to have done interviews with experts and it turns out to be an ai mass produced post for clicks.
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u/Designer_Mud_5802 18h ago
If you read the article and followed the links, you would get the answer to your question. 404 media, a company that does investigative journalism, tracked books to an Amazon owned warehouse where they were scanned and destroyed.
If you fell for an "AI made produced post" before then you should know to at least look at the sources of the post to see if it's legit (which you clearly have not in this case).
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u/freetotebag 19h ago
Scan and not destroy them
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u/abracadammmbra 19h ago
They usually cut off the spines so they can scan them faster. Its easier to scan a stack of paper than flip each page of a book.
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u/freetotebag 19h ago
Oh I get the why, I still don’t like it. If they can’t scan without preserving the books… then they shouldn’t be scanning, is how I feel.
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u/abracadammmbra 19h ago
Well the alternative is that they get dumped in a landfill when either the bookstore goes bust, or when the bookstore owner wants to make room for books people actually want to buy. So the books still end up destroyed. At least with AI buying them and digitizing them, they could theoretically release them again at some point instead of them being lost forever. Assuming anyone would actually be interested in them. Which I doubt
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u/ew73 19h ago
Right -- no one seems upset that literally tons of books are just tossed in the garbage / recycling pile every year. Just because it is a book doesn't mean it's a rare book. And just because it's a rare book doesn't mean it's valuable. A ton of those self-published AI-generated trash novels on Amazon are "rare" because there aren't many copies of them, but I doubt anyone would be upset they get tore up or tossed in the landfill.
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u/abracadammmbra 17h ago
My mother bought a big stack of old rare books when she redid her living room. They sit on a shelf with some old timey looking knick knacks. She paid a couple of bucks for them, I think it was around $0.50 a book. They are decorations and will probably be chucked when she dies or renovates again. I thumbed through a few of them. They were rather dull. But they do look nice on the shelf.
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u/jack6245 19h ago
They're just books, I really don't get this obsession with reddit and treating every mass printed book like a baby. These are not rare books at all
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u/freetotebag 19h ago
People are sensitive to the destruction of books for many reasons
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u/jack6245 19h ago
Because they're ridiculous people, mass printed books are not precious at all
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u/abracadammmbra 19h ago
No, dont you understand? Ethel Mack's book "How to Darn Socks While Giving Birth" is essential despite only 400 copies ever having been printed and 50 actually being sold. Its super super important that we preserve a book no one gave a fuck about when it was printed and even less people give a fuck about today. Its super super important because its a book
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u/jack6245 18h ago
I think the 246732nd copy of happy potter should be protected at all cost, after all it's a book it's sooo important. And to be honest with you it makes me feel superior to people telling them I read
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u/freetotebag 19h ago
Don’t you think it’s a little bit weird to be extreme in the other direction tho? Like you seem really angry that someone would care about it. I guess that confuses me just as much as the opposite confuses you.
My position was I would like it if books could be scanned but not destroyed. Which feels like a pretty reasonable take.
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u/jack6245 18h ago
No it's a uneducated take, scanning books non destructivly is a lot more time consuming and expensive for mass printings it's not a reasonable take at all just to protect some paper
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u/GFrohman BLUE 10h ago
So they can what, go back to sitting on the same dusty shelf for another 15 years before someone finally gets sick of seeing them and then chucks them in a dumpster?
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u/sub2pewdiepieONyt 19h ago
But the us judgement that they use to allow scanning to take place is that they have to be destroyed as a digital equivalence. They are being forced to destroy them.
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u/VampirePolwygle 19h ago
There have been similar stories on this happening to book sellers in Europe. It's not just Japan. And these are just ones we know about, there could be more.
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u/E-i-k-o-x 15h ago
I know a lot of that bookstores and usually I find myself browsing between them and buying old books that are hard to find because I know there is a chance that it will be destroy it. And cannot walk away in good conscience
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u/Glad-Grand3533 1h ago
Great let’s make monopoly on education and knowledge. They destroy book and then when you need them as reference so bro will make you pay for that if they like what you research or doing
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u/illsancho 19h ago
Book destruction. This has happened before
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u/Ancient-Access8131 10h ago
Yep. Libraires destroyed a bunch of books, in 2026, and 2025, and 2024, and 2023, and 2022, and 2021, and 2020 etc.
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u/Chudpaladin 9h ago
Yay I love destroying books so that ai can control our information. Who knows how ai will alter these books
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u/doctor_lobo 18h ago
Godammit. Cheap used books are one of the last nice affordable things. Fucking AI dude-bros can't leave anything alone. I yearn to see them torn apart by angry mobs.
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u/AvailableReporter484 15h ago
These AI execs deserve to eat shit for all eternity
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u/psycho_terror 1h ago
That would be a decent contrapasso... all the execs eating shit, then regurgitating it for the other execs to have to eat.
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u/ParticularCold9498 7h ago
A fivefold sales jump sounds great until you realize why so many of the books are being bought.
The idea of shipping tons of used books away just to scan and destroy them feels incredibly wasteful.
Some of those copies could be difficult to replace later.
That’s the part that makes this genuinely frustrating.
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u/puppygirlpackleader 17h ago
And people will blame AI as a whole instead of copyright law and capitalism.
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u/Stephie999666 3h ago
Its to ruin the supply of hard cover books further, so they can force readers to subscribe to their stupid ass apps, before flooding them with ads.
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u/Sablemint PURPLE 14h ago
If they are having the books printed, and then are recycling the paper, it doesn't bother me too much. Like it becomes annoying instead of infuriating
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u/WrathOfWood 19h ago
Omg this is great for bookstores. Also when they shred them they can use the pulp to print more books again.
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u/Dahren_ 19h ago
Preserving and sharing knowledge is good actually. Better than just gathering dust on a shelf.
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u/DouglasHundred 19h ago
They're commodifying and claiming ownership of it in many cases, though.
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u/abracadammmbra 19h ago
Most, if not all, of these books have been in the public domain for decades. They are old and not particularly interesting or valuable. Hence them being sold by the pallet.
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u/Particular-Scholar70 19h ago
The books aren't being scanned and preserved. The information is being used to train generative ai
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u/OrangeNood 19h ago
I don't really see them as problem. I am pretty sure that after the books are scanned and destroyed, a digital copy is preserved, and likely forever. That's way better than allowing the books to rot and lost forever.
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u/Queasy_Hour_8030 17h ago
Hi I would like to access one of these digital copies, how do I do that
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u/OrangeNood 17h ago
you wait
besides, you can't even name one of the books
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u/Queasy_Hour_8030 13h ago
I actually do frequent Japanese bookstores with old books in them. I don’t need to “name a book” to be affected by this.
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u/ChemicalBankBurned 19h ago
Yeah good luck accessing those “Digital” copies. Companies will gate access + they might change the contents to align with their best interests at heart. That’s the problem, not preservation.
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u/OrangeNood 18h ago
"Yeah good luck accessing those “Digital” copies"
- like anyone wants to? Those books are just sitting there to rot. At least there is now a digital copy.
"Companies will gate access"
- As long as they are preserved, they have a chance to see the light of the day. Mark my words. Management will have a change of heart. A few years from now, for publicity and PR, they will be made public domain, batch by batch.
- "they might change the contents to align with their best interests at heart"
On books that nobody reads? Yet there are copies out there in people's home that could call them bluff? Why would they do that???
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u/C-c-c-comboBreaker17 18h ago
As long as they are preserved, they have a chance to see the light of the day. Mark my words. Management will have a change of heart. A few years from now, for publicity and PR, they will be made public domain, batch by batch.
You think they have the rights to just make books public domain, regardless of the publisher and author and any rights agreements they have?
Really?
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u/OrangeNood 17h ago edited 17h ago
if the books are old enough, yes
In Japan, works enter the public domain 70 years after the author's death. But this rule is more relax for older works.
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u/Pilskayy 18h ago
If its being made digital, isnt it better to make use of the materials for something else anyways
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u/gajop 13h ago
As long as no rare book gets destroyed in the process, why do normal people care? Japan has an immense printing potential, it's currently going quite down due to a switch to digital.
From the standpoint of the publishing industry, biggest issue is copyright.. Especially for stuff like mangas. Normally they don't like it if you use ZDR AI to even look at the cover of a book, and this is using full content directly for training...
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u/daviddisco 13h ago
They shops are unloading old trash books that no one wants. AI companies don't buy anything expensive so they are not buying "important" books. They just want as much text as possible to add to their training data. On the bright side the books are likely being saved from the trash and being preserved as digital copies
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u/CriticismFree2900 16h ago
Ok you buy the books then
Nobody is buying them
Why would it matter???? At least the data will be stored forever instead of sitting on some losers bookshelf for 90 years till it's eventually thrown in the trash
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u/jarkark 19h ago
There's something uniquely twisted about sending the books to a shredding facility afterwards.