In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

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[–] smh@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

"destructively scan" makes sense. It's a PITA to scan books--their spines get in the way and the images are warped, so you have to do fancy image editing. You also have to turn the pages somehow.

It's much easier to cut off the spine, turn the book into a set of loose pages, and send it through a feed scanner

That's what we do at my school when we scan old yearbooks, if we have enough copies. We keep the loose pages around in a folder in case we need to rescan, but generally the quality is pretty good.