I destructively scan books

Books are not transcendent objects immune to the passage of time. Books are fragile, despite what Jeff Bezos thinks: books that are not cared for will mold or otherwise deteriorate. Their literal shelf life is determined by choices publishers make: as a fan of mid-century genre fiction, I have had the spines of mass market paperbacks disintegrate with each turn of the page, the glue deciding to retire. My cat did not like being told not to investigate the growing pile of dried glue in my lap as we read through an old collection of Judith Merril stories.

I would argue we currently face something of a preservation crisis: the postwar boom in mass market originals created a generation of books that do not have much longer as 'books.' I constantly come across books from that era with a single digit number of reviews on Goodreads, and no digital copy available - legally or illegally. People want to believe books are permanent, but materially they are fleeting. As a reader of poetry, I think too of the 1960s era 'mimeo revolution' and wonder how much of that has been lost. Frankly, I hate living in a world where so many books by Alice Notley or Bernadette Mayer are unobtainable.

The preservation of these literal archives is also a labor and capital intensive endeavor: climate controlled facilities staffed by numerous trained professionals are required. As universities are defunded, the continuation of these archival efforts are threatened. Meanwhile, the conglomerated publishers seem more interested in publishing celebrity memoirs and profiteering from the rise of fascism than reprinting long out of print classics, even as the prices for some of these classics on eBay exceed $100 or more. (I am not counting Amazon because there is no guarantee that what you receive won't be, for instance, a print on demand version of the digital version. For instance.) And this, of course, is not confined to publishing: the quotes of various video game executives live in infamy among a certain subset of gamers. Across industries, Modern Library has given way to Penguin Random House.

So, when the negligence of our slumlord damaged most of our books beyond keeping, I did not hesitate to destructively scan them. Even as a steadily employed middle class American, rebuying all those books is not really possible. And, if you read my last post, you might know that I physically cannot track them all down at library sales and used bookstores again. Quite a few books were literally irreplaceable too: I owned a copy of a chapbook that the author himself no longer had a copy of! I chopped them out of their bindings and put them through the scanner. They were not going to last forever, especially in the state our landlord left them in.

What I'm getting at is a reality of the world we live in: intellectual property does not exist to preserve books. We in fact live in a world that is hostile to the (re)production of luxuries like poetry. Intellectual property isn't even really *about* books! Intellectual property is tool of American hegemony! The rent seeking intellectual property exists to enable is part of the very impetus for the flood of AI written books and AI itself: AI has largely been used as a cudgel against creative professionals to erode their hard won rights in their struggles against capital.

This is not to say I am a defender of the labor AI companies do. What I am saying is intellectual property is the immediate precondition for the existence of so-called AI. AI is intellectual property's child, its heir. Not even a bastard! (We seem to be living in the time of "the causes are very good.") This does not mean I am asking you, dear reader, to reconsider your horror at the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books. I am suggesting, instead, that if you care about book preservation, you consider alternatives to the world we live in: the world AI emerged from was hostile to books. The world of AI is hostile books, but the future does not need to be. Worse, both these worlds are hostile to both the creation of art and artists themselves!

Further too, it is worth considering the Meaning that is lost with the crumbling of the midcentury era of publishing to dust: the demise of the mass market paperback has been marked with many heartfelt obituaries, but putting them through the scanner can offer a different life, a window of a kind into that world. On top of that, as I've been saying for years, the official digital editions of these books that rights-holders have bothered to sell are often poor quality scans of the mass markets, generated through OCR. To return to an earlier point: publishers are not preserving these books even when a legal digital copy is available. It's simply rent seeking.

Again: I am not thanking Anthropic (or any other AI company) for destructively scanning books, preservation: they do not care about those books either. Books have been rendered data by these companies that ARE criminal enterprises under existing law. Again though, AI is seen as perhaps THE most important tool of US hegemony for the future, so intellectual property is being sacrificed for its existence: Fascism is here, right now, possibly on your block. The US tore up international law, all of international law, to murder hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, and an even more insignificant piece of paper will not stop those same forces from stealing from copyright holders.