> I have heard allegations that they might be destroying non replaceable books, but only as a hypothetical.
> Replacibility is the standard tbat matters in this which I mentioned in my post. I haven't heard of a specific instance of an occurance of destruction of an irreplaceable book, but I'm willing to look into cases if you have a link.
I think you can assume they're destroying rare or even irreplaceable books, unless they can show they've implemented careful processes to avoid doing that.
But given they're all basically SV startups, it's very unlikely they're doing anything except the minimum effort to get what they want now.
For me it’s just as unbelievable that the second hand book stores would sell rare or irreplaceable books at bulk prices.
If they do they are really not good at what they are doing and I wouldn’t blame any startup big or small to destroy it, especially after preserving it digitally.
> If they do they are really not good at what they are doing and I wouldn’t blame any startup big or small to destroy it, especially after preserving it digitally.
1. That's fucking bizarre logic. "It's ok to do bad thing if someone didn't stop you."
2. These startups aren't "preserving" it digitally. The destroyed physical copies would have likely outlived whatever datasets they're creating.
Rarity equating monetary value is a common logical fallacy often found with stamps and other collectable cultural artifacts (details would disgress too much here, see Pokemon cards or whatever).
And rarity vs quality ir utility is even harder.
But value is 1) not determined by scarcity and 2) neither by "unique information content" (because that's by definition not measurable without a panopticon) and 3) nor by "creative value" per se 4) it is indeterminate whether some detail in a work might prove useful later, in general. Even for scientific papers.
They just can bet on all fronts and for training material it's 100% rational to do it.
Apart from that, to briefly disgress into the discussion of "cultural value": many cultural works we hold as very important today were sold for cheap, if at all, when the author died.
Music scores are good examples.
But back to the broader "value"/rarity angle:
The historical value of some odd self-help or DIY instructions book from the 80s is hard to determine! It might happen to be able to provide a secondary source for something, or even act as primary source for some other fact of the time that is tangential to its subject.
None of the qualities that make trivial literature interesting to, for example, researchers, must correlate with market value (at the time of writing or at the time of research?).
Sure, there are truckloads of "unique" books from even 200 years ago that are neither culturally valuable nor sellable right now.
But these things can change quickly.
Imagine you want research details about old retail products.
Or the usual street price of something in some city at a specific time.
Or the inhabitant of a certain rentable space at a certain time.
Or some specific detail about replacing the parts of a certain type of car that's no longer around (is this valuable then?).
Humans create endless complexities, and monetary or evolutionary value is not coupled anymore to step-changes such as "how to light a fire using X,Y,Z".
We're deep down the rabbit-holes of our own ephemeral shaping of our world.
What word was commonly used to describe a sandwich in 1925 in Hungary.
Or what problems did people commonly encounter when repairing car doors in the 1940s in England?
Whatever. I can't make up a good example right now, but market value does not imply quality; and even quality (according to some cultural norm) is not universally measurable.
> Replacibility is the standard tbat matters in this which I mentioned in my post. I haven't heard of a specific instance of an occurance of destruction of an irreplaceable book, but I'm willing to look into cases if you have a link.
I think you can assume they're destroying rare or even irreplaceable books, unless they can show they've implemented careful processes to avoid doing that.
But given they're all basically SV startups, it's very unlikely they're doing anything except the minimum effort to get what they want now.