this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Nice that they're actually buying them this time instead of just downloading torrents of book collections again.
I imagine they already burned through literally all of the torrentable books
That would be all the books.
Far from it. I think you vastly underestimate how many books have been published, and in what small quantities.
Estimates are around 15% of books is digitised, and less than a third of that is searchable. I’m guessing a small fraction of that is torrentable (yes that’s a word I just made up).
Not the rare, out of print, and long forgotten. And that's what's so scary about this. They're probably not paying to scan books that would otherwise end up at a landfill.
Only ISBN'd books, so anything earlier than 1965 is currently not requested by them