but, like, I have a lot of problems with this panic. The process of digitization does necessarily involve destroying the book, or at least, if you want to go fast. The fastest way to scan books is to remove the pages from the spine and having them go through the scanner. If the book was getting digitized at a mass level, it was getting destroyed one way or another. Now, I could agree that this should be made available on a public pdf repository, but if any other organization undertook the same amount of digitization, you can bet that the books are not making it out of the process, either.

Also, like, this sort of shit pisses me off so much as a (former) librarian:

One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

like, these people were 1) not seeing the books circulate via sale or 2) making the effort to make the content be available to the public. From the point of view of the general public, you were not getting access to the book either way. These companies are not ripping books off the shelves of public libraries to do this; they are buying books that were not circulating, and they are, as of this reporting, not competing with preservation groups that are trying to digitize the books. This is just blatantly stroking panic when the person that's being interviewed and stroking the panic was also not doing anything about the problem at hand. Why should this be considered a loss, when this small business tyrant is also not diong anything for the public?

On top of that, the article says:

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so.

Like, are we suddenly against first-sale doctrine? Do they know how hard it will be libaries to operate without it? I am just going to take ALA's website's block quote on this matter here:

The “first sale” doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 109(a)) gives the owners of copyrighted works the rights to sell, lend, or share their copies without having to obtain permission or pay fees. The copy becomes like any piece of physical property; you’ve purchased it, you own it. You cannot make copies and sell them—the copyright owner retains those rights. But the physical book is yours. First sale has long been important for libraries, as it allows them to lend books without legal hurdles.  (Jenkins, Jennifer. 2014. "Last Sale? Libraries’ Rights In The Digital Age". College & Research Libraries News 75 (2): 69-75.) 

In other words, as ALA says, "first sale is what allows libraries to do what we do – lend books and materials to our patrons, the public." The way that futurism goes after first sales as an underlying cause for this "evil" phenomenon while elevating the voices of small business owners that had no problem keeping the rare books out of the public in the first place shows that this is not out of legitimate concern for the future of public access of/dissemination of past information, but for getting people riled up in cheap moral panic.

can people not in the profession like stop putting our foot in their mouth for two seconds? The internet archive's digitization process, while not destructive, is much slower and crucially, is like that because they often do not own the books they deal with. The advertisement for their process is supposed to appeal to the people they are asking to borrow from to archive the material. This is a different process from institutions that do own the books they digitize. There is simply no one-size-fits-all best practice for digitization, and pretending that the (relatively) glacial pace at which the internet archive goes through theirs is the best is naive at best and putting books as a sacred object that cannot be harmed as the priority over the quick and efficient process of digitizing books.

Speaking of which, what happens if they adopt the internet archive's method? Let's say the books are saved; do they go back to the private sellers that was "selling no more than 20 books a week"? Who does that benefit, other than the small business owner that was gatekeeping access to people who didn't pay for the book? Do they open Altman-Amodei pile of uncurated books with random ISBN numbers with the leftovers? You do know that the approach with the internet archive works because they rarely, if ever, keep the books and are offering only digital access, right? Since these companies will keep the books, to ensure access to the physical books, do we have librarians, the most expensive part of running a library? You do know that library is not just a place where people pick up books and put them back, right? Having a pile of "rare" books, with no consideration for their needs, is the second-surest way to destroy the book, after doing it physically for a purpose. You are literally just asking for them to destroy the books still, this time, with a risk of a warehouse full of books with mold. So we just get a slower digitization process with destroyed books, or we enrich small business owners here, and why do we want either of this?