Out of print

There were forerunners. Nicholson Baker in his 2001 book Double Fold raging at early library digitization efforts that destroyed their physical holdings. Google contracting with the University of Michigan on the quiet in 2004 to digitize their books, bypassing copyright. Other than needing content to feed the adolescent Internet beast that now controls the world, there were more high-minded reasons for digitization. Something like three out of every four books that have ever been published are now out of print, inaccessible unless you hunt online or haunt thrift stores. Physical volumes are expensive to house, and only useful to the person holding them. Digitization increases access (only for those with devices and connectivity, but I digress). If physical versions have to get destroyed in the process, the argument goes, so be it. Now the AI harvesters are using the same playbook. Amazon mass-buys used books for industrial scale ingestion and destruction, as feed for LLMs (the…