Thomas_More
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Again, in terms of working class students in colleges you are right.
But a book for me is not just information.
For mere information we have textbooks and the internet, and pamphlets (such as our party pamphlets).
I support you, and I know that under capitalism us bibliophiles will become an ever shrinking minority, considered “saddos” by the majority; and yes, we will increasingly have to make do.
I was just saying that in a socialist society we wouldn’t have to.
Nice ideas, but they are all about “making do”, aren’t they? Why should we have to make do?
My books each hold for me memories and stages, emotional as well as merely intellectual, in my life. I don’t see why books should all be relegated to text alone and why we should have to make do with computer print-outs, no matter how they are put together.
In socialism we would all have free access to the means of production and have real books made traditionally should we want, even a minority of us. We can have spiral textbooks but also bound and sewn traditional books. We wouldn’t be expected to make do.
I don’t think people in a world that is our own would want to be sat in front of screens for the most part. I think they will want the tangible in life in preference to the virtual. And if not, then the minority who do will have the tangible as our choice; a real choice. We won’t have to make do.
I have no problem with a balance between print and digital. It’s the destruction of books, the substituting digital for everything, the digitalist bravache about “the end of print”, and the disappearance of print magazines etc. that I hate.
AI Overview
The French public and cultural sectors have responded with intense alarm, deep cultural unease, and immediate legal retaliation following unsealed U.S. court documents exposing “destructive scanning”—the practice where AI firms like Anthropic buy physical books, slice off their bindings with hydraulic cutters, scan the pages, and pulp the paper to secure “pure,” human-written, pre-2022 data. [1, 2, 3]
Because the French perspective heavily prioritizes l’exception culturelle (the belief that cultural goods are not mere commodities), the reaction has transcended standard technological debate, triggering sharp resistance across several layers of society.
1. Legal and Institutional Retaliation
While a U.S. federal judge ruled that destructive scanning is legally protected under the “first-sale doctrine” (provided the company buys the print copy fair and square and destroys the physical book to maintain a 1:1 format shift), European and French laws do not mirror this structure. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Publishers Launching Lawsuits: Vincent Montagne, president of the French Publishers’ Union (SNE), slammed the practice and immediately escalated a legal offensive. The SNE, alongside independent French authors, filed a massive counterfeiting and unfair competition lawsuit against Meta and other AI firms, vowing to fight the exploitation of French literature to the very end. [1]
Copyright Defiance: Under European jurisdiction, mass scanning without direct authorization from copyright holders is considered a clear infringement. French cultural bodies are heavily lobbying the European Union to close any legal loopholes that AI companies might exploit to shield themselves under the guise of “transformative use”. [1, 2, 3, 4]
2. Backlash From Bookshops and Literary Circles
The revelations from “Project Panama”—Anthropic’s internal code name revealing their objective to “destructively scan all the books in the world”—sparked particular outrage within France’s deeply embedded network of independent bookshops (librairies). [1, 2]
Fears of Data Poisoning and Manipulation: French historians, intellectuals, and book enthusiasts have taken to public forums to voice a dystopian anxiety. They argue that taking France’s literary history and locking it behind a private corporate database allows tech behemoths to eventually manipulate, rewrite, or erase original historical and cultural records. [1]
Suspicious Bulk Orders: Independent bookstores across Europe, including adjacent borders, started raising red flags after receiving massive, automated, and erratic online orders for obscure, out-of-print, and academic titles. Sellers expressed horror upon realizing that these books were not destined for preservation, but were being routed to bulk collection points to be stripped, digitized, and fed to machines. [1, 2]
3. Cultural Evocations of “Barbarism”
In the French media and public square, the response has been framed around deep philosophical and historical traumas.
The “Anti-Alexandria” Sentiment: The act of intentionally pulping physical books to feed artificial intelligence has been widely branded by European critics and literature lovers as “a kind of barbarism”. [1]
Fahrenheit 451 Realized: Commentators in the French press have drawn chilling comparisons to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The public consensus points out a dark, modern irony: whereas historical regimes destroyed books to erase human knowledge, Silicon Valley is buying and shredding them to teach machines how to replicate human thought—treating France’s rich literary heritage purely as disposable raw material.AI Overview AI companies are aggressively purchasing and destroying millions of physical books—including vintage, out-of-print, and rare titles by authors like Oscar Wilde—to digitize them for LLM training datasets.
AI Overview When AI companies use a process called destructive scanning, they shred every single physical copy they purchase and scan, which often amounts to millions of individual books and duplicate volumes gathered in bulk.
