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Poll

I prefer...

...generally films to books
[ 3 ] (37.5%)
...generally books to films
[ 4 ] (50%)
...generally beer and then we'll see whatever else you may've got there
[ 1 ] (12.5%)

Total Members Voted: 8

Topic: Films and Books (Read 91350 times)
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Films and Books
Sometimes they make both a book and a film out of the same story, such as all Michael Crichton or all Stephen King...

This thread is to share and discuss literature and cinematography as art forms and personal passion, not as mere entertainment. List your favourites and discuss :)


MY BOOKS TOP 5

Mika Waltari, Sinuhe
Milan Kundera, Immortality
W.S.Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Ghazali, Niche of Lights
Vidyaranya, Panchadasi


MY FILMS TOP 5

Miyazaki, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi
Chaplin, City Lights
Kromanov, Põrgupõhja uus vanapagan (1964)
Nair, Salaam Bombay
Petersen, Das Boot (1981 original, not the lengthened director's cut)


COMMENTS

In my list, the books Sinuhe and Of Human Bondage have made it to film. I have seen the films Sinuhe by Michael Curtiz, 1954, and the British Of Human Bondage from 1934. While re-written well into self-contained films, they are necessarily limited compared to the books. The novels are true epics and cannot be properly transferred to film (unless one is ready for lengthy soap-operatic TV series).

Among films in my list, I have heard that Das Boot was originally a novel, but I haven't read it. Põrgupõhja uus vanapagan is a novella by the most celebrated Estonian author Tammsaare, based on Estonian folk tales. The film version is by one of the very few Estonian directors who is worth to be called a director at all. Estonian cinematography in general never was worth watching, but Kromanov almost has a touch of Ingmar Bergman. Estonian writers are generally recommendable though.

Re: Films and Books

Reply #76 –
Yesterday I watched The Pianist by Polanski. It relates the plight of Jews under Nazis in Poland far more pointedly and insightfully than Schindler's List. I was especially impressed by the amount of clarity around depicting the Kapos, their role and function. In Schindler's List the Kapos are near-invisible.

When The Pianist initially came out, I thought I could watch it a bit later at a more opportune time. And just like that over 20 years passed. Until yesterday, I did not even know that this meme was from that movie.


Re: Films and Books

Reply #77 –
AI Companies Destroying Books For Training
Quote from: https://dallasexpress.com/national/the-vanishing-page-ai-firms-scan-then-destroy-rare-book-editions/
AI companies are purchasing physical books in bulk, including rare and out-of-print titles, then using high-speed machines to cut the spines and scan the pages before disposing of the originals, according to court documents and industry reports.

Court filings unsealed in connection with a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic detailed Project Panama, which began in early 2024.

An internal planning document stated that “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The same document added that “We use a ‘soft codename’ for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this. This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic.”

In a June 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California held that digitizing legally purchased print books and using the resulting digital copies to train large language models was fair use. The judge noted that the process replaced the print copies with digital versions without adding new copies or redistributing them. Anthropic later settled related claims involving pirated digital books for $1.5 billion.
The implosion of the AI bubble should arrive soon. AI deserves to crash and burn.

Re: Films and Books

Reply #78 –
In principle destructive scanning can be a perfectly normal part of mass digitization. But those internal planning documents do make it sound like they're not taking any of the typical precautions, since otherwise they could just say they only do it to mass market paperbacks while non-destructively scanning or otherwise processing rare books.

There's even a well-known big tech analog that already works that way: Google Books.

Quote from: https://www.npr.org/sections/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_patent_7508978.html/
Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who've pondered "How'd They Do That?" you finally have an answer.

It's also incredibly hypocritical that Anthropic dares complain about other people training a bit on output from their model. They're one gigantic distillation operation themselves.
Quote from: https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.

Re: Films and Books

Reply #79 –
Quote from: Frenzie – on
In principle destructive scanning can be a perfectly normal part of mass digitization.
Of mass digitization of pulp, yes, but not of rare books.


A Study in Scarlett, a long essay about that everybody's beloved Gone with the Wind is actually Southern Lost Cause nostalgia propaganda, sanitised and polished for publication via careful pre-screening by editors. Margaret Mitchell was influenced by the writings of Thomas Dixon Jr., who gave us The Clansman, the book that yielded the movie The Birth of a Nation that brought back KKK in all its glory. There's more to the story, such as Mitchell's interesting jazz cabaret socialite career, so give the essay a read.

I liked Gone with the Wind. I was attracted by the (occasionally quite) evident sarcasm with which Scarlett O'Hara was depicted. The character of Scarlett seemed rather light-headed, rightly mockable, so the sarcasm looked well placed. The essay reveals two things I had no idea about. One: Scarlett represents some of the worst aspects of Mitchell herself - except she does not think of those aspects as the worst, but as sort of socially normalish coquetterie, mockable but easily forgivable little sins. Two: Scarlett was not intended to be the main heroine by Mitchell. The pure and delicate Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland in the movie) was.

Re: Films and Books

Reply #80 –
The 2,000-Year-Old Ethics Test That Most Modern CEOs Fail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5rwU8NrEJ0

The test is De officiis by Cicero. For example the so-called grain ship dilemma, as explained in the video. It is not really a dilemma: To do predatory commerce or not?

De officiis has been on my to-read list for half a year. The book club is moving slow. I have read some of Cicero's disputations, and found him a sleazy manipulator when it comes to legal and contractual matters. We'll see if De officiis paints a different picture or at least introduces enough nuance.
 

Re: Films and Books

Reply #81 –
No real surprise, but we now have confirmation that Amazon does it too: https://www.inc.com/georgia-fearn/amazon-buying-up-older-books-destroying-after-scanning-back-to-2024/91392000

Meanwhile, Google is destroying privacy rather than books:
https://document.epiq11.com/document/getdocumentbycode?docId=4606206&projectCode=SPJ&source=DM
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bankruptcy

Re: Films and Books

Reply #82 –
Quote from: Frenzie – on
In principle destructive scanning can be a perfectly normal part of mass digitization. But those internal planning documents do make it sound like they're not taking any of the typical precautions, since otherwise they could just say they only do it to mass market paperbacks while non-destructively scanning or otherwise processing rare books.

There's even a well-known big tech analog that already works that way: Google Books.

There is a volunteer predecessor, Project Gutenberg, that began all the way back in 1971. Also a Nordic one, Projekt Runeberg (1992). There is a scale difference. Gutenberg has digitized about 79,000 books, Runeberg about 7000, Google Books 25+ million books. That said, both Wikisource and Internet Archive both sit on a massive library of digitized books and texts. Wikisource has 10 million articles, while Internet Archive has 20 million texts (and over a trillion web captures), of which 2 million books. Wikisource and Internet Archive don't necessarily digitize themselves, majority are donations.

Anthropic has supposedly destroyed one or two million books. Not known how many are rare. There is a private archive of 1 copy of each book.

Re: Films and Books

Reply #83 –
Quote from: jax – on
Not known how many are rare.
Though it is known that they prioritize "less common" books. Of course for the most part less common isn't the same thing as rare but it does give you pause.

Incidentally, this article was just published about Zoom Books.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/08/21/nederlandstalige-tweedehands-boeken-zijn-een-goudmijn-voor-ai-bedrijven-dit-is-een-vorm-van-barbarisme-a4934839?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=clipboard&utm_campaign=share&utm_term=share-modal&gift_token=4934839~1788091134~XJUytp0IEeKfgABQVoV_mg~Mx6Z9GzH2sFpeY-w7M3YEfVXAFm_uXrDHNSx-3evV5A

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/07/31/800-000-nederlandstalige-boeken-zoom-books-de-slegte-om-ai-te-tr/