There is now a growing realisation that Britain's second-hand bookshops are being pillaged - not by voracious collectors of prized first editions but by Silicon Valley tech firms for a far more insidious purpose.
What are they doing? Buying things. And treating those things as if they owned them, the bastards!
Today, the Daily Mail explains how millions of second-hand books are being bought in bulk and sent to warehouses across America, where the pages are sliced from the spine before being fed into industrial scanners, harvested for their text, and later destroyed.
This process, known as 'destructive scanning', is the latest method of gathering the vast reams of data being used by Big Tech to train its AI chatbots.
I wonder what Longrider's take on this is...
'It's a moral dilemma,' says Lucy. 'They're my books, my babies. I feel like we've been eaten by the AI monster. It's difficult.
Then why are you offering them for sale?
'I want the sale, but not to somebody who will b****r up everybody's books.'
Well, you gave up the right to demand what should happen to them when you sold them!
Aside from the obvious concerns over copyright - of which more later - there are fears tech firms could be destroying rare books - even the last remaining editions of some historical tomes. As Lucy herself admitted, some of the books purchased from her store are 'collectable and valuable'.
It would be perfectly ok if a person bought them, read them once (or not at all) and then put them on a shelf never to be taken down again, I suppose?
'Bulk-buying books just to rip them apart to scan is shocking, but it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the brazen theft of copyright materials by the tech giants,' says Dan Conway, CEO of the Publishers Association.
The books are paid for - thrice, once by the original purchaser, and a second time as second-hand books, so it’s hard to see how authors are being hard done by here.
Most book-lovers would find the practice of destroying huge numbers of physical volumes stomach-churning. Scenes of grinning young Nazis burning towering pyres of 'un-German' books in university cities across the Third Reich in 1933 are seared in the public memory: a 'cultural genocide' that continues to horrify us.
The books aren’t being destroyed entirely, though! Their content still exists, just in digital format.
Of course, the AI companies would argue they are doing something different: rather than destroying books to censor the material they contain, as the Nazis did, they are destroying them in order to disseminate their contents more widely.
They would be right to argue that, because they demonstrably are.
