TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
There’s no use, those books barely have any cultural value. They’re unsold inventory, why would you pay to rebind them ? Nobody wants to buy them anyway.
Books (as in the physical object itself) are not rare or particularly precious they’re among the most mass produced objects in the modern world.
This reminds me of a book I read recently. I get like 30 $1 paperbacks at the library used book sale every spring / fall. When I’m done reading them they go on the unit book cart for the patients unless theyre wildly objectionable (and it takes a lot for me, I recently put out some only mildly tasteful furry badger shapeshifter smut).
Anyway this year I got something called “the king’s hounds” where the back summary sounded lit but it turned out to be super rapey (like Sean Connery bond just keep doing it until they shut up rapey). And it’s been sitting on my coffee table collecting dust since I finished it because it feels wrong to just throw it away but I’m definitely not giving it to my patients (who like, ALL have rape PTSD for some reason). I probably will wind up throwing it out but. Fuck. It just feels wrong to destroy a book for some reason even though that’s probably the only thing to do.
Yeah, same, if a book comes into my hands it’s pretty much saved but I understand that in their natural habitat their life span is not infinite.