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We've been getting a lot of questions about how the Internet Archive digitizes books. The short answer: page by page, by hand. You may remember our viral 2021 video of Eliza Zhang scanning a book. That's still how we do it. Meet Eliza, and learn how we scan books: blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/m...

This is a lot more elegant of a solution vs AI Companies cutting off the spline, scanning the pages, and trashing the original material.

But it’s also a lot more labor-intensive and, depending on the book, not always worth it. An AI company bought our local library’s outdated stock, books that had already been sorted out and marked for destruction anyway.

I don’t think it’s outrageous that AI companies don’t want to pay someone $7.50 an hour to do that lady’s job of saving the books after scanning.

Like what?

Piracy ?