What's this about?
Anna's Archive argued that AI companies buying and destructively scanning books — cutting the spines off to feed sheet scanners — is quietly consuming rare copies, and called for scanning rare books before they are gone. It drew 914 comments, the largest thread in this digest.
What exactly is "destructive scanning"?
The fast way to digitise a book is to slice off the binding and run the loose pages through a sheet feeder. It is far cheaper than photographing pages one at a time, and it destroys the book. For a mass-market paperback nobody minds; for a book with few surviving copies it is irreversible.
What's the community saying?
HN 645 points, 914 comments
- The top comment reframes blame onto copyright holders: if rights holders will not reprint and will not release the copyright, they are the reason companies must buy and shred physical copies to ingest them.
- Disappointment aimed specifically at Anthropic, on the grounds that preserving human knowledge is a collective responsibility rather than one company's to trade away.
- A well-argued dismissal: since the printing press, any important book exists in thousands of copies, and a digital scan is not destruction in any meaningful sense.
- The inverse question, asked seriously — why save physical books at all? Storage is not free, and if a book is truly rare it is probably not valuable.