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 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.
This happened to come up in a podcast I was listening to yesterday. An author was describing visiting their publisher’s warehouse to sign books and seeing their conveyor belt for determining the fate of books. The books get scanned and the publisher’s algorithm decides if it’s worth storing or not. If it’s not, the belt dumps it into the giant ripping and mulching machine.
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).
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.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadGutenberg 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.
I suppose to the author then, that nostalgia should also be ignored?
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.
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).
I also enjoy Seinfeld and I have never 'got' McSweeneys. I just assumed I was a philistine to that brand of... comedy. :)
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.