Subject: Re: "AI companies are buying up rare and out-of-print books and shredding them"
The True Melissa <
thetruemelissa@gmail.comnospam> wrote:
This is very silly.
Verily, in article <114be70$f8hq$1@dont-email.me>, did lynnmcguire5 @gmail.com deliver unto us this message:
"AI companies are buying up rare and out-of-print books and shredding them"
"Buying up" is intended to imply that the AI companies are buying all
the copies. They're not. Most of the books also aren't rare. They're
just buying copies of books and scanning them for training data.
It's usual to destroy ordinary books after scanning. The pages are
unbound for the scanning process, so when the book is not rare, the
leftovers are just thrown out as leftovers. If the book is rare, the
pages and cover can be rebound together.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/07/ai-companies-are-buying-up-rare-and-out-of-print-books-and-shredding-them/
"A modern-day version of the destruction of Alexandria?s library."
That's a very foolish statement on the part of whoever made it. The
problem with burning books in the old days was that there were so few
copies that the book might be genuinely lost. That's just not an issue
today. Except in the rare case of a rare book, destroying one book-as-
object has no effect on the book-as-text.
Vernor Vinge predicted this in his wonderful "Rainbow's End" book.
https://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-Vernor-Vinge/dp/125084150X
Predicted what? All that happened is that some companies bought some
books.
The following excerpt takes your train of thought a little further down
the road. Ancient history wonks may want to read the entire article.
...the idea that the ancients had amazing scientific
knowledge that was lost when the Library of Alexandria
was destroyed that we still haven't recovered today is
a pure fantasy. In truth, ancient peoples generally had
extremely limited knowledge of science and medicine-
knowledge which modern peoples long ago surpassed.
Debunking the myth of the Library of Alexandria's destruction
As I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019 and this
article I wrote in February 2020, the destruction of the
Library of Alexandria was nowhere near as significant as
it has been portrayed in popular culture. For one thing,
the Library of Alexandria was just one of countless
libraries that existed in the ancient world.
Nearly every city in the ancient Mediterranean world had at
least one library. Many upper-class citizens in the ancient
world also had private collections of scrolls. The Library
of Alexandria even had a rival: the Library of Pergamon,
which held a massive collection of scrolls.
We should think of the Library of Alexandria as being in
some sense similar to the Library of Congress; it was the
largest and most prestigious library in the ancient world,
but it was far from the only one. If the Library of
Congress spontaneously caught fire and most its collections
were destroyed, that would be tragic, but very little
knowledge would actually be lost, since copies of most of
the books that would be destroyed are held in other
libraries across the world.
Finally, it cannot be emphasized enough that it is the
nature of the universe for knowledge to be destroyed. If
you just leave a book sitting on a shelf, the pages will
slowly decay, it will gather dust and insects, and,
eventually, the book will disintegrate. The only way to
preserve a text is by copying it. In other words, it
takes real effort to save a text from destruction.
Unfortunately, in the ancient world, the only way to
copy a text was by hand, which was a very long, tedious,
and often expensive process. Consequently, many texts
were not copied. The reason why so many texts have been
lost from antiquity is not because one library burned,
but rather because the texts that have not survived
were not copied.
It is also worth noting that the Library of Alexandria's
decline was a much more gradual process than many people
imagine. It is true that, in 48 BC, during the Siege of
Alexandria by Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar's men did
accidentally set fire to the docks of Alexandria. The
fire spread throughout the city and it is recorded to
have destroyed a portion of the Library of Alexandria's
collection.
By the time this fire took place, though, the Library
of Alexandria had been in decline for about a century.
The early Ptolemies had provided the Library of
Alexandria with extensive funding and patronage, but the
later Ptolemies didn't do as much to support it and even
made many decisions that directly harmed the Library. ...
(excerpt)
<
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/04/04/what-was-really-in-the-library-of-alexandria/>
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