Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton

ivanjermakov

So they ran out of information on the internet...

shoo

Via google translate: > It has been discovered that online used bookstores across Japan have been receiving a surge of large orders for books since around August of this year. Interviews with these bookstores reveal reports of "100 books sold per day" and "days where sales have increased fivefold," leading to widespread speculation within the industry that the orders are intended to collect training data for generative AI (artificial intelligence). Further investigation revealed records of over 50 tons of books being exported from Japan to the United States. Is it acceptable for books to be consumed and discarded for AI training? [...] > Nippon Television investigated using "Sayari," a tool that analyzes import and export data, and confirmed records that a group company of this major Japanese book distributor exported more than 50 tons of "JAPANESE BOOKS" to the US since last year. Assuming that all the books were heavy hardcovers (calculated at 500 grams), this would amount to the equivalent of 100,000 books.

karim79

Buy as many books as you want but please don't burn after scanning.

glimshe

I'm strongly against destroying books to train AI. That said, I'd be extremely interested in exploring the contents of Japanese books, which probably have a lot of stuff not available outside Japan, through a LLM.

Haven880

2000 years ago Qin burnt books. Barbaric. Then Hitler burnt books. Barbaric. Now AI burnt books. Is legal and most cost effective ways. When Skynet happened, hard to pity barbaric humans.

duchanjo

Could this be for AI training data?

panny

A dark age will come. AI shredders destroy all the books then hallucinate what they once contained.

t1234s

The value in these AI companies will be more in their proprietary training data than the models.

RobotToaster

The sad part is, imagine how positive this could be if the scans were made available to the public.

genxy

It doesn't matter what language the tokens are in, now Eye of Sauron seeks to consume all knowledge.

rjh29

Good memories of visiting used bookshops near Kyoto University with stacks upon stacks of obscure literary works and research material. Lots of interesting books about the Japanese language that were never digitized and I always left with 2-3 new books. So I'm not super happy about AI companies hoovering this all up and not making the scans available.

zirkonit

Our family volunteers at a nonprofit that moves a huge number of books. We take donations and run massive charity sales, clearing tens of thousands of books a month. Pricing works like a ladder: you try to sell a book for a couple of bucks, then for a dollar, then by the $5 bag, then for free, and you still end up with thousands of books nobody wants even at no cost. These used to go straight to pulp. Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally. I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.

tsylba

Ah yes, the litteral destruction of culture and physical media for a centralised subscription service. I love the liberal world of techno enclosures of our new overlords, viva el free market economy.

patall

Can someone explain why the old books could really be relevant. I get the pre-nuclear steel analogy, but why is this relevant given how much more modern texts exist. A few years ago, millions of yahoo groups were erased but now a few thousand books are what is needed to run a successful AI company? I mean, it can barely be about the information in those books (that would be very often outdated), but just for a little more text (with ever less marginal gain), what is the benefit?

YVoyiatzis

Pretty much as it happened with vinyl records twenty years ago. I remember seeing photos of this guy somewhere in Brazil standing atop heaps of vinyl records which he had amassed with HDLR intention. Now books. Some of us hold on forever.

mistercheph

Before you buy the apologia that these books are not valuable or interesting: if they weren't valuable or interesting the AI labs would not be spending billions of dollars to purchase and scan them. Yes, everyone has a personal anecdote about pallets of garbage books but I have three insights for you that you may not have because you don't read or sift through pallets of garbage books: 1) The labs don't want garbage books, they want interesting books that are rare and unique. They want high quality training data, random permutations of language style are fine, but what you want is unseen information, unseen patterns of thinking, unseen ideas. 2) Most pallet of books contains lots of valuable and interesting works, maybe 1-3% but sorting through them takes time, money, and energy, that's why the labs are starting to purchase by the pallet, it's because they already have a fully automated process so they can always beat any bookseller small or large on cost to find the books of interest and value in a pile. 3) Many of these pallets may sit for years before being sorted, and many of the books may sit for years before being sold, but these things actually do eventually happen, valuable books are found, and they eventually make their way to interested readers, this is the business model of used bookstores. Most books of value don't get destroyed or thrown away. Destroying human art, knowledge, and culture is an essential part of the business plan for frontier labs, it is not enough to steal and regurgitate all the art and information in the world, you also want to make it inaccessible through any other means than the regurgitation machine. Don't expect the book burning to be an isolated incident, they are coming for every other form of stored human knowledge or art, and yes, unfortunately while scanning it they will have to destroy the original copy. And attacking the past is only the beginning.

dofm

AI firms buying and destroying the sources of knowledge is a weird way to get us to Fahrenheit 451 but maybe the USA will get there before it switches to metric after all.

offsky

Business plan: Use AI to write fake old books. Make a used bookstore to sell these books back to AI for training.

andrekandre

once these books have all been scanned and destroyed, doesn't it mean later competitors (and free-as-in-foss alternatives) wont ever be able to catch up? it seems really sad that these books data isnt open in the first place...