FaceDeer

In another comment regarding these books, you said:

They can keep both for all I care, tbh.

So it really seems you’re just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don’t care about the books or who they go to in the end.

First people complained about them pirating, now people are complaining about them following copyright. It should be clear at this point that the people complaining don’t really care about either, they just don’t like AI.

But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who’s going to take them that values them more than that?

Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?

Oh, I’d thought he’d died already.

Ah well. Soon.

Well, who’s talking about buying?

How else do you think they got the books?

Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other “normal” people. By our definition of “normal.”

And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, “normal.” Often when an election happens.

We would have anyway. One of the common symptoms of dementia is obsession.

I can imagine a couple of reasons.

The most straightforward one actually is “capitalism”, but maybe if I explain it a bit you’ll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It’s like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for “disposal” in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There’s lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that’s easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called “signatures”, typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn’t leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that’s a cost that produces a book that’s probably worthless for resale anyway.

Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can’t blame them too much.

Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.

I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.

Trump got 32% of the vote in Massachusetts. I’m sure you can easily rustle up some far-right voters there.

So, a ton more developers for the GrapheneOS ecosystem.

Because it’s not just about him. It’s about the fact that nobody is reining him in. There were supposed to be all sorts of checks and balances in the American system of government but apparently they either don’t work at all or congress is okay with the president threatening to forcibly annex former allies because he wants their territory.

That tells us a lot about America and gives us plenty of things to think about long after Trump’s dead and buried.

I recall reading that obsessions are a common symptom of dementia.

Indeed, these are way better than a simple opinion poll if your goal is an actual prediction. People who are good at making predictions will be rewarded and continue to participate, those who are just going by vibes or whatever will lose money and hopefully learn to stay away. “Insider information” is kind of the point of markets like this, it’s a way to surface that information to the outside world.

Even though most of the things he says will never happen it’s still worth noting that this is where American discourse has reached. Their president can freely threaten to forcibly annex former allies simply because he wants their territory, and yet for some reason this isn’t an impeachable action. It’s not even a top headline.

Uh huh.

DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.

Yeah, “something bad happened” doesn’t always mean “and therefore someone must be to blame.” Sometimes life just sucks.

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