Satire, but the idea gives me the creeps. Our local library sends books to the landfill after booksales.
So, anecdotally, I am 77 and made book reductions before I moved to the countryside. At the time, I used Half Price Books, which was a few miles away, not 150 currently, I have an enormous number of nice books needing good homes. HPB was good in that I did get some money, people kept jobs and people really WANTED the books simply because they had to pay money for them.
The 150 miles and boxing and hauling are daunting. The books are mostly woodworking, gardening, landscaping, some fishing, and lots of cooking.
My plans are to simplify my lifestyle so that I can concentrate on just a few great interests. Things like landscaping are not in the plans.
I can set up a mailbox if anyone, especially a cause helping people learn trades, is interested. They would flood Little Free Libraries. Location is near Yosemite, and unfortunately the Yosemite library is a branch of said book burial agency. I get a carful in for free with Veteran's and Senior passes. Hint, hint.
Mods, it's not about money, but about putting things to good use, rather than creative or uncreative destruction. You know, when I hear of books being banned for kids, I think "well, why can't they have electronic copies or access to books page by page on the web, like the Internet Archive does?" --- though too many seem brutally truncated. But kids and physical books seem to go hand in hand, and one school district is going back to tree books, where you can only hold one of them in your hand, not one with millions of others a click away.
You guys have heard the Seinfeld Isn't Funny trope thing? Where Seinfeld had a style of humour on the show that became such a widespread cultural sensation that people who watch the show after became immersed in comedy derivative from it think it's not funny because all the jokes are boring? McSweeney's is from the turn of the century, other side, and so should be classic.
But this feels like a mashup of the Twitter snowclone "I'm the guy who was in charge of sending the HBO email / writing the GCP AI announcement / etc" with the classic goes-on-too-long Reddit bit. I know, I sound like a guy ranting about a satirical piece but it just sounds like a Reddit copypasta snowclone. And not because of it, I'm sure, but because that style is pervasive.
Ah well, it's my fault for ruining my brain on reams of Reddit content. Mostly I'm just commenting to see if anyone else has burned their neurons on garbage like I have (DAE? See, the reddit is everywhere).
Might I suggest that any copyright domain where these texts can be freely offered receive them as a secondary recipient?
Do this quietly.
Edit: "and sometimes a handwritten note from 1894 that I don’t bother to read"
From this time, there is no excuse. Preserve these digitally, as you found them, for the public good.
Alternate take: was the intellectual murder of this author required to feed your neural network? Do you realize how awful this looks?
To be legal: request an AI in Australia if you want it to know about Orwell.
Edit: Claude says: “Worth flagging: this is satire, not a real employee. It’s a McSweeney’s humor piece by Jack Loftus — the “guy who destroys antique books” is a fictional voice piece, not a real Anthropic person giving an interview.”
The author of the 404 article that broke this story (about "rare books" being destroyed by AI model companies) was interviewed by NPR. The books, so far as anyone knows, turn out to be manuals for old office equipment or vanity press material. They are indeed rare, but they're rare for the same reason my 11th grade history papers are rare: nobody cares about them.
Meanwhile: the book industry destroys books by the millions every week. Destruction is part of the natural lifecycle of a book. Books are not generally preserved. If you box up all the books you find in your parent's attic and haul them to your local library --- if they accept donations at all; many don't, and will tell you to take them to thrift stores --- the majority of those books will also end up in a dumpster.
McSweeneys is of course a satire site. A list of destroyed books would require leaking proprietary information from the AI companies, unless one of them volunteered the list (or disclosed it in a court filing). They have admitted to destroying books in court.
Oh I’m not disputing that books get destroyed in the process.
But the uproar, where it exists, has been about “antique” or “rare” books but no specific examples, which should leave us skeptical that a reasonable person would consider them rare or antique.
This claim was new to me recently, but I've seen it's become widespread. From other HN threads, it sounds like it's based on what Judge Alsup wrote in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which Anthropic's destroying scanned books was one factor supporting a finding of fair use.
I could see companies wanting to try to fit their activities into the same contours that the court approved there, since they could then argue that they should be just as protected as the defendant in that case was (that is, it may have inadvertently established a set of practices that companies would like to copy). However, it doesn't seem to me that the court concluded that destroying books was necessarily required (in particular because the contrary scenario wasn't examined there). That is, the court felt that destroying scanned books made the fair use argument stronger, but didn't say, as far as I know, that the fair use argument would necessarily fail without it.
But indeed, I guess it might take a lot for a company to decide to create a different and untested fact pattern and then defend it from scratch in new litigation.
I suppose to the author then, that aesthetic, social or historical preservation reasons, nostalgia etc. and other non-economic perspectives should also be ignored?
If someone scanned and reproduced the Mona Lisa, and then destroyed the original, do you think most people would be ok with "it's just an inventory problem"?
Satire, but the idea gives me the creeps. Our local library sends books to the landfill after booksales.
So, anecdotally, I am 77 and made book reductions before I moved to the countryside. At the time, I used Half Price Books, which was a few miles away, not 150 currently, I have an enormous number of nice books needing good homes. HPB was good in that I did get some money, people kept jobs and people really WANTED the books simply because they had to pay money for them.
The 150 miles and boxing and hauling are daunting. The books are mostly woodworking, gardening, landscaping, some fishing, and lots of cooking.
My plans are to simplify my lifestyle so that I can concentrate on just a few great interests. Things like landscaping are not in the plans.
I can set up a mailbox if anyone, especially a cause helping people learn trades, is interested. They would flood Little Free Libraries. Location is near Yosemite, and unfortunately the Yosemite library is a branch of said book burial agency. I get a carful in for free with Veteran's and Senior passes. Hint, hint.
Mods, it's not about money, but about putting things to good use, rather than creative or uncreative destruction. You know, when I hear of books being banned for kids, I think "well, why can't they have electronic copies or access to books page by page on the web, like the Internet Archive does?" --- though too many seem brutally truncated. But kids and physical books seem to go hand in hand, and one school district is going back to tree books, where you can only hold one of them in your hand, not one with millions of others a click away.
You guys have heard the Seinfeld Isn't Funny trope thing? Where Seinfeld had a style of humour on the show that became such a widespread cultural sensation that people who watch the show after became immersed in comedy derivative from it think it's not funny because all the jokes are boring? McSweeney's is from the turn of the century, other side, and so should be classic.
But this feels like a mashup of the Twitter snowclone "I'm the guy who was in charge of sending the HBO email / writing the GCP AI announcement / etc" with the classic goes-on-too-long Reddit bit. I know, I sound like a guy ranting about a satirical piece but it just sounds like a Reddit copypasta snowclone. And not because of it, I'm sure, but because that style is pervasive.
Ah well, it's my fault for ruining my brain on reams of Reddit content. Mostly I'm just commenting to see if anyone else has burned their neurons on garbage like I have (DAE? See, the reddit is everywhere).
Apparently I am not on reddit enough, since I have no idea what a snowclone is.
I also enjoy Seinfeld and I have never 'got' McSweeneys. I just assumed I was a philistine to that brand of... comedy. :)
yada yada yada
Basic suggestion: many countries give much less time for copyright than the U.S.
Gutenberg Australia has all of Orwell online for download, legally:
https://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell
Might I suggest that any copyright domain where these texts can be freely offered receive them as a secondary recipient?
Do this quietly.
Edit: "and sometimes a handwritten note from 1894 that I don’t bother to read"
From this time, there is no excuse. Preserve these digitally, as you found them, for the public good.
Alternate take: was the intellectual murder of this author required to feed your neural network? Do you realize how awful this looks?
To be legal: request an AI in Australia if you want it to know about Orwell.
Edit: Claude says: “Worth flagging: this is satire, not a real employee. It’s a McSweeney’s humor piece by Jack Loftus — the “guy who destroys antique books” is a fictional voice piece, not a real Anthropic person giving an interview.”
You had to use an LLM to figure out an article was extremely obvious satire… society is doomed.
I guess we're doing this again.
The author of the 404 article that broke this story (about "rare books" being destroyed by AI model companies) was interviewed by NPR. The books, so far as anyone knows, turn out to be manuals for old office equipment or vanity press material. They are indeed rare, but they're rare for the same reason my 11th grade history papers are rare: nobody cares about them.
Meanwhile: the book industry destroys books by the millions every week. Destruction is part of the natural lifecycle of a book. Books are not generally preserved. If you box up all the books you find in your parent's attic and haul them to your local library --- if they accept donations at all; many don't, and will tell you to take them to thrift stores --- the majority of those books will also end up in a dumpster.
What would be great was if those scanned books were made available in their entirety for public consumption if they are old and rare.
None of the articles I have read on this topic name any specific books. I couldn't see the name of a specific book in this article either...
McSweeneys is of course a satire site. A list of destroyed books would require leaking proprietary information from the AI companies, unless one of them volunteered the list (or disclosed it in a court filing). They have admitted to destroying books in court.
Oh I’m not disputing that books get destroyed in the process.
But the uproar, where it exists, has been about “antique” or “rare” books but no specific examples, which should leave us skeptical that a reasonable person would consider them rare or antique.
The post is so well written but I think I only got the first part. Or is that it? If so write more, you’ve got talent!
Why destroy, though?
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Because they're legally required to.
This claim was new to me recently, but I've seen it's become widespread. From other HN threads, it sounds like it's based on what Judge Alsup wrote in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which Anthropic's destroying scanned books was one factor supporting a finding of fair use.
I could see companies wanting to try to fit their activities into the same contours that the court approved there, since they could then argue that they should be just as protected as the defendant in that case was (that is, it may have inadvertently established a set of practices that companies would like to copy). However, it doesn't seem to me that the court concluded that destroying books was necessarily required (in particular because the contrary scenario wasn't examined there). That is, the court felt that destroying scanned books made the fair use argument stronger, but didn't say, as far as I know, that the fair use argument would necessarily fail without it.
But indeed, I guess it might take a lot for a company to decide to create a different and untested fact pattern and then defend it from scratch in new litigation.
Because they're literally the devil
> rarity is really just an inventory problem
I suppose to the author then, that aesthetic, social or historical preservation reasons, nostalgia etc. and other non-economic perspectives should also be ignored?
If someone scanned and reproduced the Mona Lisa, and then destroyed the original, do you think most people would be ok with "it's just an inventory problem"?
Can't say I'm on board with that.
The article is satire…
Thanks, it was not obvious to me at all. The only indicator I could even find after the fact was the word "humor" in tiny letters.
The author's name and the 1st person voice of the article's name do not match.