Gotta feed the machine.

I mean, these companies are speed-running atrocity after atrocity toward the end of humanity. There is no way this AI bubble ends without mass graves.. not if we let them continue to decide how things go.

Non-profit Copyright Infringement (a.k.a. Piracy) is a Moral Duty, IMHO.

i might have a couple, and i do have a regular scanner. any good tips to make a decent file?

the problem is also that in "modern" books (like 50s, 60s, 70's and so on) these books themselves also tend to decay and just crumble after a time, due to some sort of process they do to the paper to create it. In order to truly preserve them you'd almost need like some sort of conditioned environment with the same temperature, no sunlight, stuff like that. Its a shame really, then again nothing in the world was meant to last forever.

This feels like a "moment where good people took action in history books".

Anna's is the real deal

Setting aside the bad ethics of destroying rare books, the capitalist in me is very confused: Wouldn't you put in some effort to save the rare books, if only to sell them?

If you already have the data inside the books, you can put them up for auction, donating to libraries, and so forth. You get money, a reputation for ensuring that they find a home, have a physical backup if the storage drives fail, and so on.

...my inner capitalist is disillusioned. 🤨

I have access to a book scanner, but I’m not sure what books need to be scanned, are legal to be scanned and uploaded (I don’t want to get expelled for using a school scanner to do something illegal), or whether there is personally identifiable data in the PDFs it generates (I think I can also save in GIF and maybe PNG?). Is there a beginner’s guide anywhere for all this?

God the future is depressing

AI companys would probably like this. Easier for them to get data.

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.

A year too late

The only book I have that might be worth scanning is Knight’s Modern Seamanship 13th edition from ~1960 (was provided to my mom as part of a record-finding request regarding my grandpa’s WW2 deployments, I have no idea why), but if my time in the Navy is any indication, its one of those things that was given during basic to all going through basic (I have a modern copy from 2007 as well), so idk if its a valuable contribution. Probably already in the archive.

I also have a copy of the joy of cooking from the 70s, and a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 50s, but I assume that’s also already in there. Plus some language textbooks and the like, some bird and geology books, some limnology books, etc. the sort of thing that’s definitely already there.

I’m willing to scan them, however a person does that, but I’m not willing to destroy them. The old books came from my grandparents, through my mom, and all of those people are long dead. Everything else is from my own education and I use them for reference.

I wish I had a book scanner, I'd be digitizing every book on my shelf. I already have a good chunk of my forgotten realms stuff digitally (don't ask where I got it) but there's still a ton more I need, and I've finally gotten my spouse to read and their collection is getting almost as big as my own. There's probably over 1,000 books between all my immediate family members.

How does one find the official Anna's? I found a few that were shady af and were very obviously not real. Tor and i2p addresses are fine, too.

There is a glaringly obvious issue with this article that I see a lot of people in the comments seem to have missed:

Only one copy of any given book exists The pretense to this entire thing is that AI companies are destroying the books both because of the process used AND to prevent competitors from accessing the book. There is more than ONE copy of that book. If you buy a book, that doesn't prevent me from also buying that book. You can not like AI for a number of reasons, but this is just stupid.

NOTE: If destroying the book actually prevented competitors from accessing it, that means that all of these AI companies are only going out on the weekends to used bookstores looking for good deals on second hand books.