> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere

somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers”

the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies.

> If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more.

archivists keep everything, because we don't know right now what will be important 100 years from now.

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.

Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere are works in whole fields (e.g. history, archaeology, linguistics, ethography) that any scholar would consider key references, and as few as 100 copies were printed.

The shadow libraries have made a lot available to the whole world. It would suck if private corporations scan and shred remaining copies of these before the shadow libraries can get a scan.

I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.

With all due respect, I would say it wouldn’t hurt not to downplay this.

>It is not a big deal

have you ever held and read an old book?

I have books, but they are just objects. They're nice objects, but just objects.

Fetishizing books isn't going to help.

In fact, most of those "rare" books don't sell because nobody wants them. The AI companies are making them even more rare, so the booksellers should be thankful.

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.

It is common for academic books to have publication runs in the low three digits.

You may argue these books are not important. But how do we know if we fail to preserve it?

Whenever my wife wants to visit antique stores, I always look for old books. I have found several 100+ year old gems.

Exactly, also all those physical books would anyways get molded, eaten by moths or just naturally decay. It's not like the AI companies are obliterating every copy of every single book.

Somehow I don't think they're looking for the books that have been copied over and over.

Beware that the notion of "quality" is entirely different for AI companies: they don't seek entertainment, but sentences in a language to train an LLM.

Honestly, it’s easier to find a good movie than a good book, because books are way cheaper to publish. These days, the quality of pretty much all kinds of content has become a problem...

First of all, it IS destroyed and it is a big deal. Hardcover copies of books especially 1st - 2nd edition ones (even with mistakes) are rarer than digital scans.

Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway.

Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destroy them. I wonder why?

[0] https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/research-partnerships...

Read more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies.