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Transcripts
A tech company is scanning millions of old, rare books and then destroying them in the name of technological advancement.
What happens when we destroy real things and replace them with digital versions? We will never again know the originals.
Marlin shares of his love of books and the libraries that hold them. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world with 164 million items preserved in its walls. Marlin hopes to walk amongst those pages one day and would love to know which of his listeners have already been.
Learn more about Plain Values at https://plainvalues.com
I recently heard that big tech companies, one in particular, is destroying. They are literally chopping the spine off of old rare books and new books. They bought millions of books and are destroying them for one purpose. They are scanning them into their AI monstrosity for their large language model, and to train that model to make the world a better place. If you haven’t guessed, I love libraries, I love books, I love print, I love all things real and tangible. And it makes me really sad when I think about what is happening. When you are destroying the original, the original, this rare. Obviously it’s a treasure for the sake of digital that’s not real and can be manipulated and changed. The biggest library in the world is the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. I’ve never been there, but years ago I did a whole bunch of research because I love libraries. I’ve got books on the shelf about the library, and I just want to share a little bit of fact and data about the the Library of Congress. It was founded in 1800. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation. On August 24th of 1814, British troops burned the capitol building where the library was housed. They destroyed the library’s core collection of 3,000 volumes. On January 30th of 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,000… $23,950! a small fortune back in 1814. My goodness, 1815 I’m sorry. Today, the library houses more than 164 million items, 25 million books, 72 million manuscripts. It has a collection of 5 million maps that is the largest in the entire world. It has more than 700,000 rare books, and it constitutes the largest rare book collection in all of North America, and one of the three original and complete Gutenberg Bibles is inside its walls. The Library of Congress functions as a research arm of Congress. I didn’t really know that, and the U.S. Copyright Office, with a staff of 3,000, almost 3,100 people, and an annual budget of a little under $700 million. That’s a lot of data about a library that I’ve not yet been to. If you’ve been to it, share below and tell me what I’m missing. Someday I hope to go lose myself in 164 million items.
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