As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices.
What happens when the books don't sell?
As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices.
What happens when the books don't sell?
Our local library-connected biannual book sale puts a large dumpster, about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer, outside the warehouse where the sale is conducted. At the end of the sale it gets filled to the brim with waste inked cellulose, and sits there open in the weather until it's taken away for disposal.
Is that intended as an implicit threat - buy or we trash?
No, it's a demonstration of the lack of value of all that waste. On the last day of the sale (which decreases prices steadily over the several weeks it lasts) you can take a paper grocery store bag, fill it with books, and pay just $1. And yet enough books in the sale, enough to fill a large dumpster, don't even make that cut.
They are thrown away, which has been happening since forever, and nobody ever gave a fuck until AI got involved.
I think it hits different when you're buying large quantities of used books with an eye towards ones which aren't readily available online, and with the specific intention of destroying them.
If all these companies were doing was burning star wars tie-in novels and harry potter sequels nobody would care. That's not their goal because they already have those in their training set. The whole point here is to find rare or underappreciated books from the pre-digital era which nobody ever made publicly available in a digital format.
BTW destroying them isn't even necessary for scanning. It's the easiest way because removing the binding and turning it into a flat stack of papers solves many problems but there are actually dedicated book scanners designed to hold open the book while its photographed, and un-curling pages in post-processing was already a solved problem long before people were using AI to correct images.
Realistically the vast majority of those books haven't been touched for half a century and won't ever be read by a human again. It is a price to destroy these, but it's a price I would pay for progressing models towards AGI and the billions of lives it will save.