AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.”
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb’s website literally says “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation.”
I’ve covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it’s irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it’s legal. So it’s going to accelerate. “We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
4 thoughts on “AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals”
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I found the article on X and do not see another link
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American Buddhist Net 
@americanbuddhist.net
no separation of fiction/nonfiction? sloppy training begets slop. gigo
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Why link to your site and X.com and not the original 404 reporting?
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I found the article on X and do not see another link
@americanbuddhist.net
Here you go.
https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/
I like to send traffic to the original authors when possible.
Also, my experience has been most fedi users don't follow links to X. Seen as a Nazis bar that many of us don't want to support with traffic.
Is like removing tracking params from links. Makes fedi a nicer place.
Cheers.
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