Feeding scanned books into AI models is not preservation. The information is not intact. It becomes alloyed with other information. So then the only record is the scan. Who holds owns that? Who stores it? Will it be stored even when it is no longer profitable to do so?
I didn't say it was preservation. It doesn't have to be preservation to be acceptable. Books are destroyed by the millions all the time. Publishers pulp vast quantities of surplus books for tax reasons. Paperbacks that don't sell aren't shipped back; they're stripped of their covers and discarded.
The only thing to regret when most books are destroyed is that the resources that went into creating them were lost, and that's a minor regret.
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Feeding scanned books into AI models is not preservation. The information is not intact. It becomes alloyed with other information. So then the only record is the scan. Who holds owns that? Who stores it? Will it be stored even when it is no longer profitable to do so?
I didn't say it was preservation. It doesn't have to be preservation to be acceptable. Books are destroyed by the millions all the time. Publishers pulp vast quantities of surplus books for tax reasons. Paperbacks that don't sell aren't shipped back; they're stripped of their covers and discarded.
The only thing to regret when most books are destroyed is that the resources that went into creating them were lost, and that's a minor regret.