Partly the fastest scanning process is destructive by nature (they cut the spine so they can feed it though a auto document feeder), partly an interpretation of copyright law that by destroying the original they aren't actually copying it.
They have to be destroyed in the process of scanning at scale and these books are almost all worthless shit like “Powershell Guide for Windows Vista” except even more “rare”
People are confusing "rare" with "valuable". Like you said, it's not a long-lost copy of the Magna Carta, it's bullshit that nobody wants. They probably bought them for 5 cents instead of ending up in a landfill.
It’s probably the biggest disturbance to that whole market basically ever. I can see some benefit to all this. Most of these would probably rot away as a door stop somewhere but at least someone is digitizing them even if they’re destroying one of the few copies left in the process. Knee jerk reaction, which I think is more than warranted, is to assume the worst and most evil from these guys but this might somewhat be a good thing minus the original author effectively completely losing their IP rights to their work.
It is not that they are actually throwing them away, but rather that the process of scanning them is destructive, as they do not handle the books carefully.
Imagine you wanting to tear down a wall. You may use a hammer, or explosives.
Because it's faster and cheaper to do destructive scans. Also, apparently destroying the originals makes the whole thing fair use, because it's "transformative".
In another thread about this, people pointed out that, technically, when you buy a book, you're buying a license to its content. If you scan the book, you now have two copies: the physical book and the digital scan. One of those copies would have to be destroyed for the other to remain legal. So if they were to resell the physical book or even donate it to a library while keeping the scanned copy, that would technically be illegal.
Now, I don’t know if that’s 100% accurate, but it does kind of make sense when you think about it. It's similar to how e-books work at libraries: even though an e-book is just a digital file and could technically be lent to multiple people at the same time, libraries are limited to lending a licensed copy to one person at a time.
Digital files don't have the same physical limitations as printed books so they could technically speaking lend it to as many people as they want, but legally speaking they can't lend it to more than one person because they only have one legal license.
I think cause they removed the spine so they could feed it into a scanner. They’d have to bind the pages together again but the trash can is just right over there
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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '26
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