this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
629 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
86729 readers
3170 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
What's the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?
Have you ever tried scanning a book? It's a huge PITA.
They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.
Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.
Cause to easily scan them they remove the binding and rebinding is more work %han destroyibg so the point is capitalism
To keep their competitors from buying them and scanning them.
That seems to be the most likely reason. Bastards.
Sorry, but I did an oopsie. I watched the video linked, they destroy the books to scan them. It's really sad. Though I'm sure they would destroy them anyway.
They take apart the books to scan them. There's no scanner in the world that deliberately destroys the paper it's scanning. They pulp them because that's more advantageous to them than reselling or archiving the disassembled pages.
I assumed the process destroyed the book but keeping the contents from the competitors would definitely be seen as a business goal.
Do make sure that knowledge is only available through their model and otherwise lost to humanity.
Same with bombarding small websites until they give up and pull the plug.
Everything is fucked
Copyright. They mustn't make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it's okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that's why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one's charging you rent for using some data, then it's "unethical".
The Internet Archive absolutely does not destroy books. They scan them the hard way with the binding still intact.
I was misremembering. Google won the precedent, when they were suing over Google Books. IA had only 1 big lawsuit and were forced to settle. The non-destructive scanning is dicey.
you snip off the book and scan the binding
Fair use loophole, they claim they convert one physical book into one digital with no illicit copies, while also supporting the delusion of AI being an equivalent to a human reader. It is weird on so many levels but no one of noticeable weight asked them wtf.
That is not required by law. It is just easier to cut the bindings off. The other way is slow: https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107
I mean have you tried donating books? They just dump them into a storage room with thousands of other books donated that nobody wants.
They're pissing in the well so their competitors can't access the same information.
To avoid competitors also scanning the book to get some kind of edge.