this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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You have got to be fucking kidding me
You people have no idea how much I want AI banned all across everything. I don't care about anything at this point. These people are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL. Pure breed CRIMINALS
Fucking 90% of the books I read are "rare"
"Oh, but there's SOME benefits to having AI", says some person on the internet that had it shoved down their throat by their boss. No. Fuck you. Fuuuuuuck you all the way.
That's sort of the joke. These aren't treasured first editions. They're not shredding the Guttenburg Bible. These are single prints sitting in warehouses and abandoned libraries or dumps that nobody has read or carried about in decades. They're rare because they never got a second edition.
And the process of digitizing the book means disassembling it. So the copy (that nobody wanted) is destroyed as a result.
The article is pure clickbait. These books aren't valuable, save that they were produced pre-AI. That's why you can get them in bulk on the cheap.
They are buying up used books at rates that push up the cost of used books. That is enough to piss off people legitimately.
We also are fully aware they are not careful. Yes, they will occasionally shred the last few examples of a book that might have otherwise become useful in the future, and there's no indication that they are archivists. They will eventually destroy or loose this training data and the book contents will be gone to future generations.
Used books are practically free to begin with. Libraries will often give away whole storage containers of books that they don't want anymore. Bookstores will sell books for pennies on the wholesale market.
Half-Price offers Books By The Yard to be used entirely for decorative purposes. $50 for 40-60 books, largely organized by color and binding style.
We have vastly overproduced the physical reading material relative to consumer reading habits. We have vastly overproduced certain genres and subject matter material. We have overproduced individual volumes. These books are not useful in any material sense. No more than the clothes we overproduce or the snacks we overproduce or the automobiles and electronics we overproduce.
We are swimming in trash. We produce mountains of it. We fill ravines with it. Stop treating hording as a virtue.