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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 1 day ago by obbeel@kbin.earth to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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.

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[-] reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 day ago

We could probably recruit the special collections departments at university libraries to help since they’re already equipped, but how do we identify and procure what needs to be preserved? I kind of assumed most books were already being digitized. As a student I worked on a project digitizing old newspapers and entering basic metadata.

[-] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 day ago

I sometimes try and track down rare books from the 20th century, sometiems less than 75 years old, only to.run into the problem that the only copy is in a rare books collection in a Canadian university or some shit like that

[-] alapakala@quokk.au 1 points 1 day ago

you misunderstand, Universities are for book burnings. How do you think they stay afloat?

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026

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