alt.hn

8/16/2026 at 9:40:39 PM

Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders

 https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/wellington-second-hand-book-store-s-mysterious-orders

by beanaroo

8/18/2026 at 5:52:28 AM

It’s ugly. When there are still only some copies available of a certain book and they are all being sold the knowledge is gone. Let alone when it’s the only copy remaining.

That is of course not totally true, the copies are in private digital stores.

But for general public the knowledge is gone. Someone researching let’s say the history of a little village won’t be able to catch it.

This happens as well in current private collections. The physical book gets stored in a private book collection. But many also get out by the years when people are moving or die.

The amount of companies doing this is the real harm. There will be many companies running this process. It is absolutely not comparable to a single book collection getting burned in a house fire or being thrown away instead of donated to a second hand store.

It might feel for some as a not really big issue but actually it is in time.

by lucfranken

8/18/2026 at 5:58:29 AM

They got in trouble for violating copyright so now they are somewhat spitefully showing the alternative

by readthenotes1

8/18/2026 at 7:46:30 AM

Yes, that's a horrible way of applying the rules. Sometimes things are done according the rules but the outcome is terrible.

by lucfranken

8/19/2026 at 6:10:23 AM

Rules don't... sorry, cannot apply for both people and corporations with endless bankrolls.

That is not a realistic approach.

What's stopping say next year's billion or trillion dollar company from going into x market for used y, or vacuums up z limited natural resource? Should people have to suffer for the whims of a board of directors?

by x______________

8/18/2026 at 6:17:43 AM

They are digitally scanning them? What knowledge is being lost here?

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 6:35:50 AM

If you take the only remaining copy of book X and take it home to digitally scan it, then destroy the book and never share the scan, what has been lost?

by AlecSchueler

8/18/2026 at 7:00:57 AM

The possibility of that content ever being accessed by someone beside you.

by popalchemist

8/18/2026 at 6:40:49 AM

Nothing? What's the difference of the vast rare books in private collections never scanned or public? Ever been to the rare book conference? None of those are public.

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 8:32:15 AM

> What's the difference of the vast rare books in private collections

There's little difference and I would suggest there's a pity in knowledge being hoarded by collectors.

If we were getting into the differences, though, it would be that is now happening en masse in order for a handful of corporations to monopolise knowledge, history and ideas from books that were until recently available somewhere to the public.

I also doubt that many collectors are buying rare books with the intention of destroying them.

by AlecSchueler

8/18/2026 at 9:07:01 AM

They won't destroy the books very likely but also the amount of capacity and money to do this on a huge scale is (as far as I know) totally unprecedented.

And it's irreversible when the books are really destroyed.

That combination makes it an urgent and important issue.

by lucfranken

8/18/2026 at 9:53:10 AM

Libraries have been trying to do exactly this (digitising) for many years, without funding. Imagine the wealth of human knowledge that might be in proprietary llms after this? Will there be a path back to the source material? I hold out hope that this digitisation effort will preserve the digitised source materials in the public domain somewhere

by tbossanova

8/18/2026 at 7:16:03 AM

The qualia of reading the physical book? This is especially important with illustrations

by xyzsparetimexyz

8/18/2026 at 7:56:40 PM

The ability to cite a book as a source. No one is going to take a researcher seriously if they cite an LLM.

by tmnvix

8/18/2026 at 6:26:58 AM

The knowledge that was available to the public.

by abyssin

8/18/2026 at 6:41:11 AM

They weren't public?

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 10:58:52 PM

Do they upload them to Anna's Archive or IA?

Or do they keep it on their private, warded off storage?

by subscribed

8/19/2026 at 3:38:48 PM

Exactly as they were before then? Sitting in a book sellers private collection. But since we hate AI that is now bad.

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 4:27:45 AM

This mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.

Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.

by wincy

8/18/2026 at 5:18:20 AM

There's a bit of history to destroying books. So yes, anathema.

by krautsauer

8/18/2026 at 11:15:47 AM

Yes, destroying books is a crime. Anyone who destroys a book is a criminal.

by m4rtink

8/18/2026 at 11:45:00 AM

I have thrown out an old, mass produced paperback book that nobody wanted to buy out from me in 2 years it's been on my country website that's the most popular.

I guess I am criminal.

by StefanBatory

8/18/2026 at 12:24:38 PM

So true. This is why I boycott libraries and the publishing industry in general. Atrocious what they do to copies that don't get enough circulation/distribution! There aren't enough pitchforks in the world that can express this outrage!

/s

by JsonDemWitOster

8/18/2026 at 6:06:32 AM

[flagged]

by LAC-Tech

8/18/2026 at 6:30:19 AM

There were Nazi practicing/voting Jews. One is a political party, another is an ethnicity. It's definitely possible.

by righthand

8/18/2026 at 5:46:40 AM

Ok, but that's not what's happening. They are destroying the copies and not making them available to be shared. They are using them to increase the value of their business.

by globular-toast

8/18/2026 at 4:31:32 AM

Except we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world.

Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.

by jandrese

8/18/2026 at 4:33:11 AM

Most people do not support the destruction of books - it seems like the issue in both cases is copyright forcing the destruction and non-release of the scan.

by buildbot

8/18/2026 at 4:39:00 AM

They don't have to destroy the books to scan them. There are techniques for doing it non-destructively, but they're slower and more expensive. It's cheaper to cut the spines off and drop the stack of papers on a flatbed scanner with a paper feeder.

by jandrese

8/18/2026 at 7:19:54 AM

Destroying the original makes it easier to justify that scanning the books is fair use, because you haven't increased the number of copies. See page 16 of https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar... : "This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one)"

by johntb86

8/18/2026 at 7:10:51 AM

That is just a policy problem. A reactive legislature could fix this in a week, rewriting the law.

For example, require the digitized copies to be put in a public trust where for example libraries can provide these books as digital loans. (Per author adjustment for copyright, if it’s not possible now, store them nonpublically in the trust until later.)

by kzrdude

8/19/2026 at 1:58:10 AM

A world where the US Congress can get anything done in a week, much less something that will anger the media cartels that fund their elections and can decide who gets coverage and what kind is not anything like the one we live in.

by jandrese

8/18/2026 at 6:22:49 AM

They won’t share it.

And I bet it’s more likely that in 100 years you can read a book printed nowadays than you can read data digitized nowadays.

by croes

8/18/2026 at 6:24:48 AM

This is very strong argument and it holds as soon as 2026 - much of 90s data, a lot of it online, is of course already lost.

by larodi

8/18/2026 at 5:32:37 AM

If the book really is difficult to come by I don't know that I'd prefer it to only survive as a statistical approximation that can be mostly retrieved if you utter the correct incantation. The AI trainers don't care about the book. It's just a commodified stream of words.

by plorg

8/18/2026 at 1:04:11 PM

Let's talk again when it turned out operating LLMs at that scale isn't profitable, the companies go bankrupt, and you need to learn about said niche subjects.

by r-u-serious

8/18/2026 at 6:09:40 AM

> A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects.

Canada is one of the few “western” countries without annoying customs duty/tariff requirements to ship to by post these days. US is a mess, and UK/Europe are going in the same direction.

by Scoundreller

8/18/2026 at 7:18:31 AM

In the UK, each book published on the market must have a copy sent once to the British Library for preservation (and maybe other legal deposit libraries).

That’s a good built-in way to ensure public preservation of knowledge IMO

by jiehong

8/18/2026 at 8:05:03 PM

We have this in NZ too. The trouble is those books are not lent out. You have to go to the book. Also, with the proliferation of small print runs, self-published autobiographies, etc, I think the National Library no longer attempts to collect a copy of all publications.

If these AI companies were creating public repositories where researchers could access digital copies then I would not have such a problem with this, but that is not what they are doing. The ability of researchers to cite these books as sources is being snuffed out.

by tmnvix

8/18/2026 at 11:18:19 AM

Same here in Czech Republic - also true for most printed periodical. I've been on a tour of one of these repositories - it is super impressive & the staff takes it super seriously.

by m4rtink

8/18/2026 at 5:35:45 AM

All the offense is that books are being destroyed. They're being destroyed b/c that's slicing off the binding to get flat pages is most convenient way to scan them. But ... could AI firms sidestep all the vitriol by paying to rebind the guillotined pages? I have no experience with such things, but if they were willing get the machines to do paperback thermal bindings (even if they sliced open a hardcover) and then donate or resell the books back into the marketplace, a lot of the "destroying rare books" emotions could be avoided.

by abeppu

8/18/2026 at 5:40:25 AM

No, there are two reasons they are being sliced:

1) It's easier to scan.

2) US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy.

by qingcharles

8/18/2026 at 2:23:45 PM

> US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy.

What's the "sorta, kinda" as you understand it? Has any judge, or law, created a requirement to destroy copies?

From what I understand, depending on the purpose, making digital copies may be fair use if it's "transformative". In a decision involving Google's book search feature, the court's decision highlighted that the amount of text displayed in the product was limited and not a "significant market substitute" [2]. The AI firms aren't trying to show you a digital copy of the books, and in a bunch of contexts already, if their product regurgitates too much verbatim text, that's going to be a liability (e.g. educational uses and plagiarism). I've also tried prompting LLMs to finish a paragraph from inside a novel from a well-known author, and they have not been able to get the next sentence typically. You can't easily and with confidence just extract back a book. I have not tried the experiment of seeing how many tokens you need to spend before a books is reproduced and what the cost is relative to the original work -- and you would already need the digital text to recognize when you had succeeded.

What's transformative? Previously the courts have said that scanning to offer a search product was transformative, given some limitations on how much of the matching book is shown to the user. I think there's a decent argument that training an AI model is at least as transformative as search indexing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

by abeppu

8/18/2026 at 6:49:14 AM

If the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies.

by nullbio

8/18/2026 at 6:58:03 AM

Not sure copyright laws allow that?

by rob74

8/18/2026 at 7:15:29 AM

Well that's a big problem that needs solving. Copyright law really needs a refresh given how AI works and to cover the incentives that have been created. Including laws on how AI companies can use your data. For example, it's legal for them to claim they don't train on your data but using your data to generate synthetic data and training on that is legal and does not need to be disclosed. Most people are unaware of the fact that this is being done. Your IP is not actually safe.

by nullbio

8/18/2026 at 7:11:51 AM

Then we should change the law

by kzrdude

8/18/2026 at 7:38:53 AM

> If the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies.

Ah yes, the old "if you can't beat the ruthless type A sociopathic American capitalists who literally don't give a shit about anything other than money and power, then you should join them and make a quick buck while the world burns". A tale as old as time really; we must mirror the behaviour of people who'd tell their self-driving car to drive over a gaggle of baby geese in order to continue working on the important task of privatizing the world's knowledge. \s

Hell no. Small town bookstore owners probably have the best job in the world; if they're smart, they'd continue doing exactly as they're doing.

by brailsafe

8/19/2026 at 7:21:01 AM

This has nothing to do with sociopathic American capitalists. It would be a good idea regardless of the AI scenario, because it makes the rare books accessible to everyone instead of just the people who are fortunate enough to buy the hard copy.

by nullbio

8/18/2026 at 5:39:34 AM

How are they finding these books to order? I can't find used bookstores online anywhere.

by ChiperSoft

8/18/2026 at 7:12:49 AM

Lots of used bookstores are online, and I’ve ordered lots of books that way.

This website for example may look like a user-to-user book sales platform but most books there are supplied by used bookstores: https://www.bokborsen.se/

by kzrdude

8/18/2026 at 6:15:55 AM

Probably through a “broker” like abebooks (an Amazon subsidiary) or Amazon itself.

by Scoundreller

8/18/2026 at 6:52:57 AM

If only they could legally access the cultural heritage of mankind digitally.

by protocolture

8/18/2026 at 6:17:01 AM

I mean aren't thry literally just digitally scanning books that basically nobody else has?

I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost.

Rumors of rare books being destroyed would be the bad part of this but if "rare" is the tourist guide to a local cave why should we care?

Feels alot like the water argument

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 7:05:57 AM

"Rare" may be a low print run of some local's memoirs decades ago, or a book on the local railway, a society of firemen, people sent to a world war etc. Not something that excites the world, but still valuable to historians or people interested in local history. Even the guide to a local cave from 1960s might be printed on bad paper (so many copies perished) and contain some technically obsolete details on the then-state of nature, tourism etc.

by stereolambda

8/18/2026 at 7:29:04 AM

So ai companies can just setup an academic method for researches to see the scans? Only reason they're doing this is because people complaining about copyright

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 12:17:00 PM

> still valuable to historians or people interested in local history.

Apparently not valuable enough that they could be arsed to save a copy from Anthropic's greedy grubby hands even after DECADES of head start.

by JsonDemWitOster

8/18/2026 at 3:09:58 PM

There are people still being born in the world and growing up, you know. Or discovering new interests.

by stereolambda

8/19/2026 at 3:41:18 PM

Evil big AI not considering people who don't know yet if they care about these books.

How dare they!

by johnsmith1840

8/18/2026 at 6:19:41 AM

> I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost

Unless they're sharing the scans publicly or with the Internet Archive or equivalent, they are being lost.

by sofixa

8/18/2026 at 6:44:35 AM

One copy! A single copy of the book is destroyed and physically inaccessible.

The same effect would be if a hoarder purchased the book and never sold it or showed it to another soul. Same effect if a toddler purchased it, dropped it in their spaghetti bowl, and tore it apart.

But a copy of a book is a copy of a book! Books were designed for multiple copies being printed. Perhaps we recall Gutenberg and that whole controversy of easy printing from a press. So, the thing getting people all in a tizzy is that a single copy of a book that has, perhaps, become rare in 2026, a single copy that languished on a shelf somewhere, is being purchased and consumed.

Honestly, folks, books are really in no danger here. If you know any rare books that are irreplaceable, and with only one extant copy, just buy it yourself. For God's sake! Not rocket science.

by ButlerianJihad

8/20/2026 at 1:32:47 AM

Exactly. This is a free market economy.

Buyers and sellers come together of their own free will, unencumbered by interfering third parties and exchange money for goods and services.

There are a lot of comments in this thread proposing some kind of interfering in these transactions.

Don't like Amazon or Anthropic digitizing rare books? Then buy them yourself and stop with the kvetching.

by johannesrexx

8/18/2026 at 7:09:44 AM

Don't you think that if the books that Anthropic orders from New Zealand were available (online) anywhere else, they would order them from there rather than from New Zealand? So yes, I would say there's a pretty big chance that those books are really rare, as those are apparently the only copies you can buy online.

The actual reason to get angry about this is copyright law, which would rather have all surviving copies of a (niche, old, rare but still covered by copyright) book in private hands and inaccessible to the public, rather than make it public domain.

by rob74

8/18/2026 at 11:51:32 AM

To build on top of your argument: those books are rare because the knowledge they contain isn't valuable and nobody cares. Therefore that knowledge being destroyed isn't a bug, it's a feature. The fetish of never destroying any knowledge is the same logic that hoarders use "you never know when you'll need august 1985 issue of a Swedish women's fashion magazine".

Moreover, by scanning the books and putting them into AI models they make the knowledge actually publicly available. There's just no fucking way you'd ever read these books, while there is non-zero chance you might ask an LLM about it.

IMO the correct solution here is:

1. Things should become public domain after much shorter period of time, like 10 years or so.

2. Government should maintain a freely accessible archive of immaterial goods in public domain - music, movies, books.

The effect would be twofold:

1. Open models would have access to similar training data as private models, which would be a huge game changer.

2. Companies would be stimulated to come up with new, exciting media, rather than sell us same shit over and over again.

by anal_reactor

8/18/2026 at 7:30:03 AM

Like ever actual rare book unscanned in private collection.

by johnsmith1840

8/17/2026 at 3:44:43 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

8/18/2026 at 4:18:45 AM

For those wondering why she's wearing wool and gloves indoors - New Zealanders typically can't afford electric heating, and wear woolen clothing in doors to to make up for this, when they can't burn firewood or coal.

by LAC-Tech

8/18/2026 at 4:24:26 AM

More likely a second hand book store in Newtown is an old and draughty building. Running a heater in there would be the same as running one outdoors.

Or she just gets cold. My daughter wears those kind of gloves all winter regardless of how warm we heat the house.

by jemmyw

8/18/2026 at 4:26:12 AM

What percentage of New Zealanders do you think live somehwere that isn't cold and draughty?

by LAC-Tech

8/18/2026 at 7:21:29 AM

Well my house isn't cold and draughty so at least 0.0001%

by jemmyw

8/18/2026 at 5:26:04 AM

[flagged]

by enquirewithin

8/18/2026 at 5:36:13 AM

Fairly opinionated framing given:

  as the country grapples with record numbers of citizens leaving the country because of a weak economy, high living costs and high unemployment.

  More than 60% of those moved to Australia, where average weekly incomes are higher and New Zealand citizens have work and residency rights.

  The spokesperson did not elaborate on when the family arrived in Australia nor what kind of work they were doing, but noted it was not unusual for former leaders to spend time overseas after leaving office.
Jacinda Ardern living and working in Australia after move from US - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/26/jacinda-ardern...

New Zealand has always been a place people with talent leave (and often return to upon retirement or making a fortune).

eg: Ernest left in his post grad years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford

by defrost

8/18/2026 at 6:32:53 PM

[flagged]

by enquirewithin

8/18/2026 at 7:04:16 AM

s/she’s so reviled by New Zealanders/she was targeted by online extremists who threatened her family/

by totetsu

8/18/2026 at 6:34:40 PM

Everyone who’s anyone online is the target of “online extremists”.

Especially politicians.

by enquirewithin

8/18/2026 at 4:30:44 AM

Often kiwis can afford it but just choose not to. My own parents are well off and yet still have an absolutely freezing house all winter, it drives me crazy. Just put on a sweater, and another one over that, and a blanket....

by kiwih

8/18/2026 at 6:15:04 AM

Electricity was several times more expensive than in the US when we were there, and houses not insulated well. Sock hats and fingerless wool gloves it is.

by mixmastamyk

8/18/2026 at 6:02:50 AM

Imagine thinking that wearing a sweater in wintertime means you're poor. Couldn't be me.

The gloves are a special kind made of thermal material for people with Raynaud's disease, where narrowing of the blood vessels reduces circulation in cold temperatures.

by anigbrowl

8/19/2026 at 12:43:48 AM

Have you ever been to New Zealand?

People here don't/can't really heat their houses properly.

by annzabelle

8/18/2026 at 6:10:52 AM

I went to school 3 minutes walk from that bookshop. I know what those draughty sashcord windowed shitbox houses are like.

by LAC-Tech

8/18/2026 at 4:45:19 PM

This seems like a weirdly personal issue for you.

by anigbrowl

8/18/2026 at 2:21:17 PM

What a load of shite

by mrbukkake

8/18/2026 at 4:32:29 AM

Lol but seriously 4th highest median wealth per capita. The median NZ citizen has 3x the wealth of the median us citizen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

Of course they have very low wealth inequality so they don’t have trillionaires at all which some people may see as a problem. In fact remarkably despite the median wealth of NZ being so much higher than the USA they have a lower average wealth per capita.

They just spread the wealth around making the middle class 3x richer.

by AnotherGoodName

8/18/2026 at 4:48:59 AM

Wikipedia's (UBS') US figure ($69k) is probably wrong? US median household wealth is ~$193k[1]. I don't think there's a way to square claimed median individual wealth of $69k with that? Even taking into account children (22% population) and assuming 2 adults/household (more favorable to the math than the real 1.2-1.4 figure). I can't find anything on UBS' methodology, just the short 1.5 page paper.

[1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

by loeg

8/18/2026 at 5:07:54 AM

I don't have an explanation for this but I did note that the 2023 UBS report had US Median Wealth per adult at $107K[1].

I wonder if there is a per adult vs per person vs per working person difference in the measurement or something like that?

Edit: I've dug into this more, and the closest thing I can come up with for an explanation is that UBS changed its model for 2026 to "normalize household debt" in order to make it more comparable across countries. There doesn't seem to be sufficient information to explain how that change caused such a radical change.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20230815103944/https://www.ubs.c...

by nl

8/18/2026 at 4:31:12 PM

$107k is getting closer to being reconcilable with household $193k, yeah. The gap between $69k and $107k cannot be entirely explained by children (only 22% of population).

by loeg

8/18/2026 at 6:00:52 AM

> US median household wealth is ~$193k

Emphasis mine. US median household is 2.53 persons [1]. 193/2.53 = 76k, which is within spitting distance of the 69k per person listed. The wikipedia is median wealth per capita

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HCN010222*

by SECProto

8/18/2026 at 4:34:53 PM

I think this analysis is conflating two different kinds of household -- a 2.53 (average) figure must include non-financially interdependent roommates, which aren't included in the $193k household figure.

by loeg

8/18/2026 at 4:42:03 AM

That wealthy is all tied up in draughty houses. It's not real.

by LAC-Tech