this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
998 points (99.2% liked)

Technology

87597 readers
4282 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
998
World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 4 days ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
125 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://kbin.earth/m/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com/t/3120649

As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 17 points 3 days ago (2 children)

If you read the blog post, they don't provide help or guidance for regular bookworms on how to scan. No information about what they expect.

Also, flatbed scanning a whole book takes many hours. It's one page at a time, line up each page, press the book flat and scan, for hundreds of pages.

You'd likely need to buy, or have access to a book scanner. Which is fine, there are cheap models, but who knows if that would work for them? They don't say. It doesn't seem like they're expecting help from you or me.

[–] paranoia@feddit.dk 1 points 1 day ago

Libraries quite often have book scanners.

[–] Aceofspades@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago

I was wondering how feasible this is for an average Joe. My assumption was not very, thank you for confirming.