Mania

 August 25 Word of the Day: Mania

 

Comment on Eureka Street this week, in response to the article ‘To build Claude, Anthropic needed to destroy millions of books’: “Scanning books for digital purposes has been a mania of publishers and even librarians for some decades now. This latest manifestation of the mania is directly related to the unquestioned attitude that readers have a right to read the text (any text) in every available format. Claiming though that this wholesale, indiscriminate ripping off of prime text is somehow creating a Borgesian library of all books is a pretense, a front for making money and controlling who gets access to this library of all libraries, while feeding a mindless amanuensis. Be assured, it will not be a free public library. In fact, there is no real interest in libraries at all to judge by the practices now underway: wilful indifference to authorship, physical destruction of the original books, placing silos for manipulative purposes, &c. This becomes even more serious for books pre-ISBN (i.e. 1968), where the only way we can be sure the original is the original is by reading it in a genuine library. Some of the main reasons for rare books libraries are precisely to salvage books from permanent loss, to confirm that an author really said what they said, to authenticate literature and publications against fradulence, to provide the researcher with the genuine article. Scanning itself is a dodgy business, as anyone knows who orders print-on-demand post-Gutenberg rarities. Scans flatten the text, magnify the blots and alter lettering by their very nature. To scan a book and throw away the print original is complete stupidity, a sin against the makers of the words and of collective memory.”

 

Link to the original article: https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/to-build-claude-anthropic-needed-to-destroy-millions-of-books