this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
635 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
87417 readers
3795 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Buddy, how many books do you think are written every year?
If you started today. And did nothing but read until you died. You would not even have finished all the new books that were published last year.
Point being. There's an enourmous amount of books printed every year. Most of them doesnt sell very well. So they are sent back to the publisher. And the publisher does not have room to keep every copy. So they're destroyed. Maybe recycled into other paper products, maybe burned for energy. Regardless. What AI companies are buying is but a drop in the ocean.
And it has nothing to do with people "not reading"
It has everything to do with not reading you muppet, any literate person understands that you don't need to destroy a book in order to gain the information from it. A child could understand that there's no reason to destroy the books other than laziness or malice.
My god, tech people need to be beaten regularly.
To scan every page manually is going to take hours. Where as if you remove the spine and separate the pages, you can feed it automatically in minutes.
And since they want to process hundreds of thousands of books... well, you're literate so in sure you can do the math.
They're just books... And again. For the fifth time probably, publishers destroy more unsold books than these companies. And have been doing so for the past 50 years.
No one seems to care publishers destroy old unsold books. But as soon as it's AI companies then all of a sudden it's a crime against humanity.
Publishers aren't going out to old bookstores to buy up their old books to destroy.
Every argument you've made is halfbaked at best, tell me - what's the longest time something can be stored in a computers memory?
Now what's the longest time a book can stay intact?
Yeah, you know the answer - shut the fuck up now.
No, publishers don't go to the stores. The stores send the books back to the publisher.
What are my arguments? Can you even tell me?
Because what I've said. Is that we already do destroys millions of unsold books. And the various filings, rapports, inquiries, and fucking weather data, isn't sold at bookstores to begin with. So the risk of those being bought and destroyed are zero.
So... you have not cared one bit, that publishers destroy unsold books for well over 50 years. But when these companies do it, it's somehow terrible.