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I think people think that there are more good books than there actually are.
Looking at e.g., the latest book releases on Standard Ebooks, I recognize none of the new titles, so in some sense that site is already scraping the bottom of the barrel, despite having a catalog of a mere ~1500 books. Gutenberg's at like 78k books (though many are duplicates), and both all the titles and all the authors of the new releases are completely unrecognizable.
At the scale of millions of "books" (many of which aren't really books as the term's commonly used), well... you can randomly sample a url between https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000000001 and https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009999999 to get some sense how nothing most texts really are. It's great that they're digitized, and hopefully no non-digitized books are lost fully, but it would hardly matter if they were. No human will ever read the vast majority of these.
Books can be "good" in a conditional sense.
When I was researching the real world history of elementals for my D&D game, I found Parcelsus' "A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits" and "The Comte De Gabelis" invaluable. And while those books are hardly obscure in the right circles, I also don't think most people's lives would be at all impoverished if they never read those books. And yet, I am happy I was able to read them, and would consider it a shame if they hadn't survived to the modern day.
There are plenty of other books that are only conditionally useful for someone researching a very particular thing, and unlikely to be read by the vast majority of the reading public.
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Most written texts have been lost. Scholars generally estimate that well over 90% of classical Greek and Latin literature is gone.
I don't know about you but I would certainly like to read the remaining hundred of works by Aristotle that didn't make it, like his treatise on comedy, the 158 constitutions or the Protrepticus.
Sure there's a lot of slop and we're overflowing with slop since printing became ubiquitous, but the reflex to keep everything is understandable given how much actually important mega famous history defining classics we have lost to neglect over the years.
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A slightly more solid number (Ctrl-F "commercial value"): As of year 1998, only two percent of copyrights with age of 55–75 years retained any commercial value. That is, after 55 years, 98 percent of copyrighted works are forgotten and worthless.
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I think this is one of those moments where you'd want to step in in favor of the scoundrels of books, if you want a principled defense of the books you want saved. It seems like it was only yesterday folks were lamenting the original Dr Seuss books. Do you want to entrust anyone but yourself with the right to decide what is archived, and what is fed into the slopmachine and then wiped?
Unless Anthropic (and other LLM companies) are hunting down every copy of a particular edition of a particular book when they scan it in, I don't see how their behavior would have particular impact on this. Anthropic has negative incentive to do such a thing, because each copy of a book they find costs money to purchase and destroy, but the value they get out of using the book for training only exists for the first copy of the book.
Surely there are some editions of some books out there for which only one or a handful of physical copies remains, which was then purchased by and destroyed by Anthropic (or Google Books or some other mass-scanner), leaving either none or very few which are extremely hard to access by most people (being in obscure archives in obscure libraries). It seems unlikely to me that this set of editions of books has much intersection with the set of editions of books for which keeping at least one copy around is of immense value to humanity; generally, such books also have sufficient cultural value and monetary value that people keep them protected and/or available for display.
If the belief is that humanity ought to indefinitely preserve at least one physical copy of each and every edition of every book that has ever been published, this doesn't seem like the worst goal, but also doesn't seem like a goal that Anthropic or other AI companies (or book scanners) have any responsibility of fulfilling. People who believe that humanity has a duty to preserve at least one physical copy of all these books ought to be the change they want to see in the world.
But that's the point, if you're hoovering up books by the bushel, why use destructive methods and not simply scan them and hand over the discards to people who care about conservation?
Besides the legal obligation to do the stupid thing, of course.
Do these exist? Conservation as in, at a bare minimum, being willing to take the pages (we can leave off "and use appropriate conservation techniques," because that will make an already small group dwindle to literally nothing). And, to be explicit, "post an angry rant about evil AI companies on Reddit" does not count as caring about conservation for the point of this exercise.
Jason Scott is a real person, yes.
And yet, he also resorts to debinding for scanning (or "destructively" scans).
Understand I don't regard the artifact itself to have much value (when it comes to glued magazines anyways, old hardcovers deserve to live even if they're cookbooks). The difference here is the public gets the damn content for free, not a shadow filtered through a subscription based statistical model.
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Unfortunately, I think we live in a world where some legal obligation is the reason for a lot of stupid, destructive things happening, and this is just the latest in a very long list.
I don't know the details, but I heard that destroying books while scanning is cheaper due to the logistics of opening the book and holding it open page-by-page, but also I heard that it was the opposite, so I don't know. If the former is the case, then that provides a good non-legally-mandated-stupidity reason for the destruction as well.
That said, I imagine we're not too far from having the image processing tech required to have something akin to Futurama where Bender (a 30th/31st century android) just flips through a book in 5 seconds like a flip book and then declares that he's read it. Taking a distorted, side-angled photo of a bent/curved page of a book and converting it to a perfect copy of the original page that is literally indistinguishable, even by an AI, from an actual proper scan of the page after it had been removed from the book seems like it will be within the realm of possibility pretty soon, if not already (depending on how literally you take the word "literally"), and once we have that, it's just a matter of having cameras with sufficiently high fidelity and framerates.
We're probably already there if we were to invest in expensive machines to do so.
I'm not sure it'd make a difference, the people who complain about the destructive scanning would pivot to complaining about so many ressources being spent that could be used for taking in more refugees being used just to feed the AI slopmachines, and what about all the water being wasted to cool all those scanners?
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OP goes over this. Destroying doesn't mean they destroy the page, but scanning works best and fastest if you can get the pages very flat against a scanner. Book spines get in the way, sometimes the text get warped as the spine won't allow the page to lay fully flat against the scanner. Not to mention that you need someone (or a way more complicated machine) to manhandle all these books and spines to get the page to lay as flat as you can for scanning. Scanning a whole book of hundreds of pages that way is a job that would take someone many hours. Compare to cutting the spine, making all the pages loose and stacking them in a document feeder to feed them all one by one, perfectly flat against the scanner. It's not only the fastest, least annoying way to scan, it's the highest quality one. BUT it needs sacrificing the spine.
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