Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else get pretty tired with 404s style of writing? I hate to make this comparison but it feels like a Fox News for the left.

I always struggle with their articles because it feels like they built it for rage bait on a topic and leave the other interesting topics out of it. It is an absolute shame for books to be destroyed but what does it really mean to be rare here? I know they kind of tried to differentiate but it sounds like this could be John Doe’s self help book that never sold well. If you ever are connected to a library you will start to realize how many books simply get thrown out or sold for nothing because nobody wants them.

To me the problem is partly the copyright law. I think it’s. Hard problem but I always lean more towards books having short copyright shelf lives and making it legal for digital copies to be shared after which I think would eliminate I good part of this problem. Not to mention 99% of the books published are probably garbage but that is highly subjective.

So it is bit of a meta rant but I think there a couple holes to go down that could be extremely interesting but they always write these informationally light articles. Like scrolling through a NYT visualization for just some shipping datapoints. Don’t really dig deep on anything and then end with a trust me bro these are rare books that Amazon is destroying for AI when I cannot be that upset with the amazons of the world. There are a lot of reasons for a business to digitize books, most books are worthless and it makes sense to cut the bindings for scanning. I would rather talk about how could you fix copyright to make this less an issue but is it even an issue with how many books get thrown out?

I agree with you. And it sucks, because 404 writes about interesting topics! But they're so negatively polarized it often obscures what's actually interesting.

> I always struggle with their articles because it feels like they built it for rage bait on a topic and leave the other interesting topics out of it.

I was going to say a very similar thing, and this is something I strongly disagree with when it comes to HN's moderation, and it goes like this:

The product is the outrage.

And HN should know better and mods should actively discourage, warn and prevent accounts (who karma farm, among other things) from even being able to post rage-bait articles. These aren't "hacker curiosities", they're just insipid bullshit. We wasted time and learned nothing.

Not really. It's not to my taste, but I've found their journalism to generally be lefty but focused on important events.

Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

The difference is huge between 404 and Fox. Fox is out here trying to tell people there's a trans agenda, and that Biden was a lunatic leftist. They are just making up stories and publishing them because they know their audience engages. 404 definitely make editorial choices about which stories to pursue but I've largely found them to be grounded in real depictions of stuff that is happening.

Again, what rare books? Like they pointed to a book with low published volume or foreign language is “rare”. If you have ever been to annual library book sales you start to realize just how many books get thrown out. I can go buy a stack of books from the 1880s and 1890s on eBay right now for $25. $4 each. Most people don’t realize how worthless books are, even “rare” ones.

I even imagine that the market price for these “rare” books is helping filter out anything truly valuable and rare. It just reads as a rage bait tmz article. The quantity of used books including “rare” books that get thrown into the dump is astronomical.

I worked in a bookshop. I know all about this. I've seen pallets of books with covers torn off so they can be reported destroyed.

Here's a bookseller describing some of the books, which he believes are going to middlemen who are playing a sort of arbitrage with the AI companies by buying obscure titles, reselling them, and tossing away anything that doesn't sell. https://charliebecker.substack.com/p/is-an-ai-company-buying...

The titles mentioned there are not rage-inducing: "The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995" and "How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991". 404 writes and article about book destruction, and then explicitly neglects to mention a single title.

I suspect that's because folks wouldn't react the same way if they realized it was computer manuals for Windows 3.1. Even more obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be paying a lot for these books, so it seems outlandish that they'd be buying valuable rarities, since the booksellers would know the worth of those copies.

Good reporting on this would have included sales prices, volumes, and titles.

You don't know the books are being destroyed. There are automated scanners with page turners.

Most reporting says they are being destroyed. Page flipping is slow compared to cutting the spine and scanning the pages.

They destroy regular books. This was an intentional order from a rare book dealer. There is no reason to believe they use the same destructive process for books they should know to have inherent value and aren't purchasing in significant volume.

I don’t think we read the same article. None of these books were identified and they said rare can be low print volume or foreign language.

We don't know that they're not either. As pointed out the fastest method to scan books is to cut the spine and scan the pages, effectively destroying the book.

Is this the place we think Amazon decided to be careful and deliberate about what they do?

> Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

No, destroying collectible books would be a shame, not just any rare worthless books. But these are not collectible. The article tried to dance around it by saying maybe some books have a sentimental value to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean any library or collector wants it. Don’t fall for manufactured outrage!

Edit: Here’s an example of an extremely rare book. My great great grandfather published a book of sermons around 1920. That book has zero value to anyone other than my dad. Would I be outraged if it ended up at someone’s estate sale, then a used bookstore, and then an LLM consumed it to learn to read? No; I would have expected it to have been discarded by humans before the LLM even got to it. Most of what we leave behind is discarded.

This was my issue as well. It seems like they tip toed around it in one paragraph saying usually these are books with isbn numbers so not truly collectible or very rare and then in another paragraph plainly stated that it could be foreign language or low volume books that are rare. Rare expresses a different meaning to me and I think it amounts to exactly what you said, manufactured outrage.

We recently had a post highly upvoted here that collected bus tickets from an earlier era. It showed the unique moment in time where such fares were highly detailed, unique pieces of art. Ultimately destined to be single use and largely extremely pedestrian.

We've also seen a website that collects old paper restaurant placemats from across the ages. Literally disposable, zero value items that were made to be discarded by the thousands.

And yet, when someone has an interesting idea that ties them together, makes us recollect or think about our past in some novel way, these useless uncommon things suddenly become quite interesting.

A book on sermons, o its own, from the 1920s is maybe not that interesting. A book of sermons selected from each decade? A collection that compares regional books of sermons? A compare and contrast of the 2020s and 1920s? I can imagine many interesting thesis where a book like that becomes interesting because of the context of other books that are juxtaposed to it.

A book on Detroit motorways and bus schedules from the 30s isn't interesting or valuable on its own. But when you contextualize it, suddenly it might be a way to understand our history, our path through development and redevelopment. Connecting our present moment to the past.

Yes, I collected a couple decades of Muni fast passes too and finally gave them to an artist to destructively turn into some project. I was sad that my “rare” tickets probably won’t be kept forever, but I’m glad that somebody got some use out of it. I feel the same way about LLMs. I’m glad that they are learning from old published materials. In my opinion, 404media is cynically inciting anti-tech anger; they don’t otherwise have any interest in the preservation ecosystem.

You could donate that to the church archives of his denomination or the religious studies department of a university or at least some sort of local historical society.

I was in charge of a "lending library" ministry at my church for a few years. Let me tell ya.

We got started when another ministry moved out, and sort of from zero. My pastor's clear instructions to me were: make sure everything we carry is doctrinally sound.

So we inherited several full collections of books in rapid succession. Some had even belonged to priests and religious. Those gave me a fascinating time, because I could basically rubber-stamp every title that a priest had in his personal collection. But slowly the balance began to tip into rather esoteric volumes that normal laypeople couldn't really use. Literally books full of sermons and other arcane subjects!

I was tasked with discarding/recycling all the rejects. There were tons of rejects, believe me! So with every session when we had boxes full of donation, it was imperative to cull the bad stuff very fast, shelve the rest, and then find somewhere to dump the trash. The manager was encouraging me to recycle, or at least not tip them all into the Dumpster, but it turned out to be a logistical nightmare to find anyplace that would recycle books like that. Having no vehicle, I had to continually figure out ways to cart around heavy loads, just to get them out of church and into the trash somewhere. That was the worst part of my job.

Now it was clear that books were not a very hip or current medium, but there were plenty of elderly parishioners who did appreciate the resource and did compliment my work, but our church was not free of prejudice or judgementalism, and let me just say, there was an angel or entity whose purpose was only to jumble all the books while I wasn't watching, and leave a deliberately unorganized mess for me to confront every week. This made the task distinctly Sisyphean, in addition to the need to constantly discard rejected books.

I finally threw in the towel when large boxes of Spanish-language books were donated; there was no way at all for me to vouch or determine their orthodoxy, and the shelves were full anyways, and I was just tired of propping up a legacy ministry anyway. But it really drove home my opinions about books, hoarders, and that is why I have no troubles with the way books are currently being treated.

So it turns out your organization didn’t need so many donated books. The ideal outcome for your discards should still be sent somewhere to someone who wants to read or possess them, or barring that, to be scanned so their contents are at least preserved somewhere. It belongs in a library, even if incorporeal.

You don’t realize how many books are out there, most are worthless and nobody wants.

It still belongs in a library! At least a digital one.

Something can be "rare" while also having no value. One only needs to take a look at their local Facebook Marketplace listings to see this in action.

Rare invokes images of limited edition runs of well loved books, when in reality it's probably extremely outdated software guides, how-tos, technical manuals, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com