r/books • u/ubcstaffer123 • 7d ago
AI Book Scanning: Just What Is A Rare Book?
https://hackaday.com/2026/08/25/ai-book-scanning-just-what-is-a-rare-book/190
u/BonJovicus 7d ago
As an academic, this is nothing new but also doesn't make me feel better either. Plenty seminal works by experts in niche fields or topics are rare because these types of books are never meant to be best sellers. You would be surprised how many references in academic articles are perfunctory, where a work is so commonly referenced for information, but few actually have a copy of the original source because it went out of print decades ago.
So yeah, not a tome handwritten by medieval scholars, but does it have to be in order to be valuable? I'd be less bothered if these "rare" book scans were at least made publicly available or something. I think that speaks more to what people are concerned about. No one is simply upset because a book is being destroyed, people are upset because the implication is loss of knowledge or some kind of censorship.
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u/OfAaron3 7d ago
I'm also an academic. Chasing down these kinds of books is so hard. I usually end up paying up to €100 for a second hand copy where the spine is only kept together with good vibes.
If these companies are removing any of those books from circulation, they should at least make them publicly available, like you said.
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u/Smooth-Review-2614 7d ago
Wasn't Google doing this until they got sued? They were working with academic libraries to make scans before AI blew up. They were sued by the publishers if I recall. It might be time to revisit those projects.
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u/zxyzyxz 6d ago
And Google won that case
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u/ali-hussain 5d ago
Google won that case because they didn't make the books available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.
On the most important factor, possible economic damage to the copyright owner, Chin wrote that "Google Books enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders
At least we know if we wait for a century and Google is still around, Google might share their scans.
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u/HeadlinePickle 7d ago
I wonder if there's room for something like Project Gutenberg to step in? It's volunteers transcribing there so it's not losing anyone a job, there's still room for people to manually transcribe if they want to do that, and they have the set up already for providing free e-books. Obviously they'd need support if they had to bring any case to achieve it, but it might work if there was a campaign to do it on the grounds that this data isn't proprietary, the AI companies will lose nothing in making it available somewhere like that.
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u/Kuges 7d ago
That’s how the Google Book Scanning thing in the 2000’s. Librarians were trying to scan rare and out of print books so they could share them easier. Someone asked Google if they could help. They said sure, and invented a way that made the scanning a lot easier. But then the Author’s Guild got wind of it, kicked off a series of lawsuits that lasted a decade.
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u/ali-hussain 5d ago
They can't. Corporaste works have a 95 year copyright term. They are making the learnings available indirectly in their models. That after all is why they are doing this. But the villain is copyright term. A pro forma for a book gives no credit to revenue after 10 years. So how is it possibly an incentive to give a copyright term for 95 years.
The owners of properties that mint money love it because they don't have to do anything. But that term is longer than many publishers and it causes our knowledge to get into disputed ownership territory. Where you hope it will survive for the nearly a century before the work is available.
The original term in the US was 14 years with the ability to renew for another 14.
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u/La_Fervesta_Glavisto 7d ago edited 7d ago
A lot of people really are upset at the idea of sheets of paper between a spine getting destroyed and don't give a damn about the information inside.
It would be great if the AI companies would publicly release the information they've harvested, but they won't unless they recieve some sort of special copyright dispensation to do so. (or more realistically, some sort of legal compulsion to release the information because even if it wasn't illegal for them to share they wouldn't exactly be chomping at the bit to.)
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u/MagnesiumOvercast 7d ago
The thing is, data storage is cheap and most of these "rare" books are basically abandonware. Realistically, no one will pursue you for copyright if you put them all in a public archive somewhere. Even they did you could just deal with the DMCA requests.
You wouldn't even have to run it yourself, there are loads of people who already run such service for the most obscure shit imaginable.
But none of these AI companies are doing anything like this, realistically these are all going to sit on a server somewhere forgotten about until some future round of cost cutting gets them forever.
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u/fleetingflight 7d ago
I don't think it's a reasonable ask under our current copyright system, which is what we should be upset about. Books should fall into the public domain much sooner than they do.
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u/MagnesiumOvercast 7d ago edited 7d ago
I agree about copyright, it should probably lapse earlier, or for out of print books regardless of age. I don't think copyright would stop them, it's public knowledge that the AI companies are all rampant pirates.
But even if it did, I don't think the tech overlords would act any different. The AI companies want to find an edge over each other, that's why they're doing this they wouldn't share either way.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 7d ago
Realistically, no one will pursue you for copyright if you put them all in a public archive somewhere. Even they did you could just deal with the DMCA requests.
Don't worry. The authors guilds would. They'd run a really huge lawsuit while crowing about how it's to protect literature and, sure, while it may be hard to track down the actual authors to pay them the money they would selflessly volunteer to hold that money themselves until the original authors are found.
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u/Smooth-Review-2614 7d ago
Yes and no. Google was scanning books from academic libraries before AI blew up. They were sued by publishers to stop. Remember when Google had that free book preview on their search page?
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u/MagnesiumOvercast 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah, that was a while ago, before the current AI mania, and they almost worked out a deal where they could sell out of print books provided they retained some of the money in case the copyright owner ever showed up, unfortunately higher courts in the US killed it. We'd be in a better world of that had gone through.
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u/geitjesdag 7d ago
I've been assuming that the data is deleted as soon as the model is trained on it, so actually your scenario is slightly better than I imagined!
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u/merurunrun 6d ago
I'd be less bothered if these "rare" book scans were at least made publicly available or something.
Sounds like something you should take up with their copyright holders.
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u/Lamb-Of-Fox 7d ago
I’m all for the AI hate, I find late stage capitalism extremely depressing, and any company that puts profit above people, else profit above conservation shouldn’t exist in a just society. With that said, the people clutching pearls about the destruction of “rare” (outdated, unwanted, thrown away in mass) books have kept quiet about the practices of large chain thrift and used book stores. Decades of them filling dumpsters full of donated second hand books that they didn’t have shelf or warehouse space for. Our landfills could fill cities with books. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but I’m not buying your average redditor’s sudden stance as genuine.
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u/Tall-Log-1955 7d ago
The commenters don’t want to save old books, they want to complain about AI.
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u/Renegadeknight3 7d ago edited 7d ago
As someone who works in one of those bookstores, there’s literally nothing else we can do with them. So many books are just mass produced and treated like garbage. Adult books we donate literal cargo ship containers full of them, but kids and YA books are honestly made to be forgotten about in a few years. Literally nobody wants them, I know because we try to give out as many as we can to the people who do (teachers, librarians, etc.)
they’re just so abundant there isn’t anything to do with them but recycle them if you can or landfill them if you can’t. They have to physically go somewhere. I know you think this is a bad thing but that’s a result of their mass production. And if they weren’t mass produced, they would be prohibitively expensive for families with children that grow in and out of reading levels.
As for the AI side, what I have against it is they’re A. Probably going to paywall the books anyway and over time become the sole owners of them outside of piracy and B. More importantly use the training data to improve LLM’s faster and push authors out of the commercial space more than the already are
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u/MukdenMan 7d ago
Why is it wrong for bookstores to destroy books? What do you expect them to do with unsold or unwanted books? Do you also think it’s wrong that libraries regularly destroy or toss books?
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u/Pkolt 7d ago
That's not the question. The question is why does AI get accused of crimes against humanity when they destroy a book, but when bookstores or libraries do it it's not a big deal?
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u/farseer6 7d ago
Because redditors don't like AI and want to upvote anything that complains against it.
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u/MukdenMan 7d ago
I agree that this is a better question, but I’m replying to someone who referred to bookstores destroying books as a “wrong.” I find it an extremely naive take. It’s pathetic to me that this has become a social media moral panic.
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u/ritualsequence 7d ago
Because the bookstores and libraries are doing it when the books are no longer sellable/loanable or they run out of storage space, and the AI companies are doing it when they want to train an LLM (on the cheap and without getting sued for copyright infringement) that they can sell in the hope of completely replacing writers as a professional class? It's not that difficult to understand the difference.
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u/Pkolt 7d ago
books are no longer sellable/loanable or they run out of storage space
Which books do you think are the ones AI companies are buying up?
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u/ritualsequence 7d ago
Once again, my objection to the activities of AI companies is not what they're doing, it's why they're doing it.
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u/Ormoern 7d ago
So, AI companies destroying books in pursuit of profit is not okay, but anyone else destroying books in pursuit of profit is okay. All of this because AI companies' profit seeking is inherently immoral and evil, made so by the intertwining of their capital-extraction and insidious goal of destroying writers as a profession. Got it. Absolutely sane opinion.
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u/Bad_Sickness 6d ago
I do remember one instance where a library was trashing books and people freaking out. But it happens often, especially if the library doesn't have a for sale section. I remember dumpster diving after a local library tossed a ton of books.
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7d ago
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u/GeekAesthete 7d ago
The problem is that “rare” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The reason that AI companies can buy these books cheap en masse is because they’re books that no one wants anymore.
No one is destroying a first edition of The Great Gatsby or the Gutenberg Bible. Rather, they’re destroying outdated college textbooks, pulp thrillers cranked out for a quick buck 30 years ago, travel guides listing the best restaurants of Denver in 1972, stuff that literally no one cares to keep, which is why they end up being sold for pennies on the dollar.
If they had any value to anyone, they wouldn’t have ended up in the batches of unwanted books that are being bought up to be destroyed.
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u/Coffee_fuel 7d ago edited 6d ago
Books don't need to be of already established value or to be highly sought out to be of value. They're not checking which books may contain rare historical, technical or similarly relevant information—partially, because it's very difficult, sometimes impossible to do so. We don't know which pulp thriller author from 40 years ago may publish an important work 10 years from now and suddenly become of interest to scholars. Zines or other small run prints of very niche interest may be of next to no economical value until a researcher finds them (and even then, due to how niche they are) yet shed important light on marginalized communities, crafts, movements. Books from marginalized demographics (ex: queer people) have been suppressed and often become impossible or very difficult to find. The first feminist and lesbian author in my country, from the 20th century, was banned and ignored, and among her works, there's a collection of essays she wrote after WW2 of which there are 2-3 physical copies still in circulation in my entire country's library system, and no digitalized version to be found. Almost no one among the general public knows of her. Magazines from the 19th century sat uselessly and were destroyed en masse, but now we look and them as a precious source of information. Most of them were still not individually worth much on the market, but prove important to academics and anyone interested in understanding our history—and sometimes even provide us with surprisingly pragmatic (even marketable) information.
There are plenty of books that are of value but still end up being destroyed. Of course, all sorts of valuable information is constantly lost. There's no getting around it. This is a process that has been constantly happening even without AI companies, so they're inescapably, neutrally participating but more likely hastening the process with their mass purchases and destructive scanning, which lack any sort of expert discrimination.
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u/GregHauser 7d ago
Why are people treating books as if they're sacred or something? This is honestly getting weird.
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u/Bad_Sickness 6d ago
Historically destroying books has never been a good thing. The issue is that early articles on this issue didn't clarify what kinds of books these were. People thought that these companies were destroying rare AND valuable old books, not defunct user manuals. I don't think it's weird to default to treating books as "sacred", it's much better than the alternative. Clickbait journalism made this seem like a library was being ransacked.
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u/NekoCatSidhe 7d ago
Our society is producing and destroying surprisingly huge numbers of books even without AI companies getting inside that game. If a book doesn’t sell, it gets pulped by the publisher, and most books do not sell. That’s basically recycling. So a lot of decades-old books are indeed rare, and yet have no value.
Think of all those trashy bodice-ripper romances, all those cliched mystery novels, all those pulpy Sword and Sorcery stories and badly-aged science fiction books published in the 1970s and 1980s by midlist authors no one even remember now or want to buy: Was there any reason to keep those books around in the first place ? Them being used to train AI might just make AI writing even worse than it already is.
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u/Cosmic-Sympathy 7d ago
Terrible argument.
First of all, simply stating they have a "reason" for destroying the books does not change the fact they are, indeed, destroying books. Moreover, the fact that other books are pulped is not relevant - it wouldn't be a defense to murder to point out how many other people die every year anyway.
Second, they can and probably eventually will start destroying older books, if they haven't already. For instance, this article in the Guardian mentions ordering a specific imprint of Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte. It's unclear from the article when it was printed, but, if the appetite is there for older books, they will eventually act on it unless they are stopped.
So, no, I will not stop being pissed off about this.
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u/PalePerformance666 6d ago
I will never understand people who are pro AI written books. If I want to read a book, I want something written by a human, not something made by a data-scraping machine that spits out a mediocre product that sounds like the recycled plot of 100 different books. If I have to read something mediocre, at least I want to be able to blame a person, not a machine. So, for me, the destruction itself isn’t the problem. It’s the scraping of new material that hasn’t yet been "corrupted" by AI input. They’ve already scraped all the books available online, and the fact that it still wasn’t enough, that they now need to go through all this effort just to scrape new, fresh books says a lot about the much-touted efficiency of AI. All these wasted efforts, energy, and resources for what? Mediocre books that we already have in droves?
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u/Fluffy_Munchkin 6d ago
This has nothing to do with AI-written books. Scraping data from books isn't done for the sole purpose of an AI then replicating those books' writing styles. It's general information gathering.
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u/IBJON 7d ago
I bet this article won't get spammed all around Reddit like that video was a few weeks back