That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn’t make it okay.
Comment on [deleted]
SculptusPoe@lemmy.world 3 days ago
When a bookstore goes out of business or just can’t sell a book, they don’t return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
astro@leminal.space 3 days ago
Words and ideas don’t become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 3 days ago
Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.
astro@leminal.space 3 days ago
This seems more like an indictment of the practice of physical publishing than destructive book scanning, in which case I generally agree. There are a host of industries with baked-in inefficiencies that our life experiences have conditioned us to accept as normal or unavoidable when really have no business persisting in the modern world. Printed books is definitely one of them.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I didn’t say words were sacred, but destroying millions of books is a colossal waste of resources. This is not totally fine.
astro@leminal.space 3 days ago
The resources were wasted by the publishers when they transformed the resources into a finished product with very limited utility and reusability. Books on shelves are not resources.
trolololol@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I don’t mind if they destroy 10k copies of Fabio’s books. It’s probably not even half of the print run so for a thing, it’s guaranteed to be no harm because there’s enough copies around.
But when you say destroy ALL books, you’re also talking about rare first edition of whatever Shakespeare did, and manuscripts of Beethoven, and authors that I am fond of but I have no chance to buy used or new, or find in a library, because it’s not popular and/or is in a language that is not from the place I live. And that’s not cool.
So first things first, no single entity can have access to all books. Not even reputable historians would get access to anything they just ask around. Then there’s books that have few copies and no one has any clue where they are. Etc etc.
trolololol@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Haha I remembered this post and though it was worth dropping it here
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Yeah that’s exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They’re taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don’t they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I’m as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don’t have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
astro@leminal.space 3 days ago
They don’t need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.