In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
I’m not signing up with a random website to read their article but… what? “Destructively scan” books, as in they rip the book apart in order to scan it?
I mean, if they paid the the books then they can do whatever they want with them. I don’t see the problem.
“destructively scan” makes sense. It’s a PITA to scan books–their spines get in the way and the images are warped, so you have to do fancy image editing. You also have to turn the pages somehow.
It’s much easier to cut off the spine, turn the book into a set of loose pages, and send it through a feed scanner
That’s what we do at my school when we scan old yearbooks, if we have enough copies. We keep the loose pages around in a folder in case we need to rescan, but generally the quality is pretty good.
They want to have the only copies
This was literally covered in Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge.
It’s all part of the whole storyline we’re stuck in:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
