“We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026.
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.” […]
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.
I forget who said this but “He who destroys the past, controls the future” I am thinking that it was either Lenin or Stalin who uttered these “bon mots”.
Pol Pot perhaps.
That led to the Killing Fields where the Khmer Rouge used children to kill all of the educated people in Cambodia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
George Orwell, from his book 1984.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The enlightenment in reverse.
This makes the “firemen” in Fahrenheit 451 look like pikers.
As an addendum, I don’t think I can memorize a Cliff’s Notes, much less an entire book at this point.
Because this is a high-tech book burning … so advanced.
Book.. Schmooks …. who the hell reads books anymore … we have iPhones now …. we read text messages. That is part of the reason everyone is so stupid and knows so little.
It’s not the only reason. I’m thinking of the black actress with the Ivy League education in “Theater” hired to play Helen in the Nolan Odyssey movie, who A) had never read the Odyssey in school and B) didn’t think there was any need for her to do so. And still hasn’t read it, according to interviews.
She didn’t know that the Greeks invented theater either.
“Digital preservation” — change a word in a text, and you can change a meaning. Change a meaning and you can change what is seen as truth.
This has always been made a bit more difficult with the existence of primary sources that could be found and referred back to, but if there are no primary sources?
L – “… but if there are no primary sources?”
Then there is no history, no wisdom, no truth, no North nor Eastern star to orient the way ahead. Like a person without a memory of their personal history, who is disoriented for as long as they live. Which is not long when facing the great difficulties of life. Hopefully, some copies of “Man’s Search for meaning” by Dr. Victor Frankel will survive.
But the existence of physical books threatens the lust for absolute power of digital oligarchs e.i. Google ironically touted the slogan “Don’t Be Evil” just before becoming a meme for censorship.
On the bright side, after they run out of old books to destroy maybe they’ll consider HIRING HUMANS TO WRITE BOOKS the way it used to be. I’d sell them a copy of one of my books for $10K, for training.
Just at the moment your regular author makes more at their part-time McDonald’s job than they do writing. And no, I did not make that up.
Writing teacher here: part of learning how to write is reading. Even Homer had a base of material to work off of; oral tradition, but Homer wasn’t an ordinary writer and how much oral tradition will be lost with the destruction of those books?
We are no longer an oral society; people do not practice memorizing oral traditions.
Good thing the Canadian First Nations have … knowledge keepers … to pass on their collective memories. Like all those murdered children in the Residential Schools mass graves.
Oral traditions are nice … for passing on mythologies
I refer you to Tolkein and Lewis about the importance of mythologies…fairy tales.
Perhaps there is something to be learned with regards to having knowledge keepers to pass on our collective memories.
I agree … when myths and fables contain an uplifting or moral message. Not when they are just lies and innuendo.
This is criminal, to put it mildly.
Any and all who participate should have the living shit beat out of them and then be fed to alligators.
The judge can be hanged.
Oh, for f*ck’s sake, no it isn’t.
It’s not illegal for me to buy a rare book and then burn the thing to ash, which means it isn’t illegal for someone to buy hundreds of rare books and shred them.
The legality issue was copyright law. AI companies say “we scanned the copy into memory, and then destroyed the original, so there’s still only one copy” but this isn’t even remotely how copyright law works. Either the judge erred or we’re not getting an accurate description of the legal arguments involved. Probably both.
As for “you can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th century botanical text” – why would you need to? It’s long out of copyright and the text can be copied ad infinitum.
And what happens when the power is cut to the data center, or when the AI company goes bankrupt?
Communists get elected to power? Just a guess.
That generation will not care, as long as they have Tik Tok or what ever their preferred social media platform at the time.
Oh, and that judge said it is legal so that makes it okay.
sooooooooo is the nxt reallyreallyreaally big library story going to be the digital archive was discovered to have been hacked and the reliability of the copies is now in question? jist askin’ . . . . .
(and some will claim it was ALL prearranged, they will be summarily silenced . . . . . .)
Hacked? No need. The knowledge keepers will change the wording as they see fit.
ha ha ha !!! just called up the local university library suggesting they sell all their volumes since they will be seized anyway, make some money off their holdings of 100,000s volumes.
and, l repeat, ‘AI will destroy civilization’ and this little tidbit is a HUGE step forward.
have fun!!! long weekend coming up !!!
The only reason certain people want to have the only copy of a document in a data base is so it can be changed, at their will, with no way to verify the change.
See, the US Constitution now says arms are illegal, and abortion is a right…..