I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
“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.
In The Mail
Reader Eddie McTier kindly sent copies of two books a few weeks ago as a “thank you”, and I’ve been remiss in not posting this sooner.
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But it’s not too late for summer reading material. Check them out by clicking on the images.
Thanks, Eddie!
Truinnerashuvaduprezure!
Now in hardcover.
In his candid and revealing memoir, Joe Biden reflects on his time as president: the challenges, triumphs, sorrows, and accomplishments that marked his administration amid one of the most tumultuous eras in American history.
Foreword by the Autopen: A whole lot of edits in the video, and it still required subtitles to make out what Sundown Joe is mumbling:
Poison Is Queen
Dispatches from the Maple Gulag Truck Stop
Gord Magill’s book has made the bestsellers list in pre-orders.
Keepers Of Deep Knowledge
Three tales of leftist librarians. And the loud buzzing inside their heads.
Something-something “white supremacy” something-something “privilege.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.
But really, it’s the same doctrinaire horseshit we’ve seen a hundred times. And according to which, the world will be enormously improved by the “abolition of policing in all its forms.” If that isn’t sufficiently unambiguous, our Ivy League librarians insist that their “ultimate goal” is, and I quote, “the complete abolition of law enforcement… everywhere.” Because “a world without policing” will somehow, rather conveniently, be a world without crime.
And because helping people find the books that they’d like to borrow is just too boring and insufficiently high-status for minds such as these.
Oh, there’s more.
The Inverse Of Diversity
I have my disagreements with Plato, but I think he’s essential reading for a course in philosophy. Texas A&M, on the other hand, begs to differ.
Most philosophy nerds will recognize the “gender ideology” readings in question, which are lifted from the Symposium. The university apparently quibbled with Plato’s reference the the “Myth of Androgyne,” in which Aristophanes describes three genders.
The regents used AI analysis software to audit syllabi for unapproved content.
In The Mail
A new wolf attack thriller from polar bear researcher, Susan Crockford;
IT’S THE WINTER OF 2029 AND THE LITTLE SURFING TOWN OF TOFINO HAS A
BIG PROBLEM WITH WOLVES THAT IT NEVER SAW COMING. FIRST DOGS
DISAPPEAR, THEN PEOPLE START TO DIE.JUST AS RCMP WILDLIFE SAFETY
SPECIALIST LUKE ROBINSON THINKS HE’S FOUND THE RIGHT PLACE TO BURY
HIS GRIEF AND START LIFE ANEW, HE GETS CAUGHT UP IN A WOLF ATTACK
CRISIS OF EPIC PROPORTIONS.
Susan Crockford is a zoologist (BSc., Ph.D.) turned novelist, best known
here for her work on polar bears, has also studied wolf behaviour and dog
domestication for more than 40 years.
End Of The Road
Pre-orders open now.
Magill, a third-generation trucker who has driven the ice roads of the Great White North, the deserts of the Australian Outback, and everywhere in between, shows how surveillance technology makes today’s cab a virtual prison, demoralizing drivers and eradicating truck-stop culture. He reveals the immigration scams putting grossly unqualified drivers behind the wheel. And he gives an inside account of the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” that provoked the most thorough persecution of political dissenters in Canadian history.
There’s even a discount code.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Library patrons are requesting non-existent books and media hallucinated by AI systems, leading librarians around the country on a wild good chase. The unlikely source for the non-existent books are reading lists published by major newspapers that mixed in AI-generated titles with the real thing.
The Prophecy of Walter Kirn
@walterkirn – Here is a short book I wrote in a strange autumnal trance in 2005 about the sort of subterranean identity-challenged online young men whom I’m afraid have become more prominent in the news since then. It was my best shot at divining what was coming.
“It blew my mind”
Sean Spicer, on Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
A bitter and betrayed Biden tried to paint himself as a magnanimous leader stepping down as the top Democratic knives came out, including betrayal from Pelosi, Obama and Schumer. The problem was, nobody had faith in Kamala, including Obama, yet here she was. How could Democrats, after everything they preach, pass on the first black woman running for the highest office in the land?
The World Needs Less Canada
Pre-order at Sutherland House;
A shocking, darkly hilarious exploration of how Canada, a country once admired for its stability and moderation, became a global cautionary tale.
Drawing from real headlines, deep research, and extensive interviews, acclaimed journalist Tristin Hopper uncovers the bizarre missteps and policy experiments that have helped Canada set new global standards for disfunction. The examples are legion: the real estate bubble that never bursts, Orwellian internet regulations, harm reduction policies that escalate harm, official health guidelines that recommended the use of glory holes in a pandemic, and a runaway euthanasia system that inspired the Wall Street Journal to declare, “Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now.”
You Will Eat Bugs, Live In A Pod, Own Nothing And You Will Like It
I Will Not Eat Crickets – A book review by Rick McGinnis.
There are many recent books that share the same targets as Díaz without his satirical tone, but you have to understand up front that his target—globalism—has had a sea change in its definition and its opponents in the last generation. Back when free trade was an article of conservative political faith, the globalist worldview was embraced by people who wanted to lower costs, broaden supply chains, and – as they sold it in a best-case scenario – export economic prosperity from first to third worlds as they offshored labour.
Like most ideal scenarios, it didn’t quite work out as planned.
An Amazon Sabotage Goes Horribly Wrong
Amnesia Generation
In the next few hours I want you to imagine the largest books burning you can muster in your nightmares.
This is what it will be like as some one-of-a-kind out of print books are deleted by judge orders.
This is not a dream but are we awake?
Fahrenheit 451 https://t.co/OeiYfz72Bg
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) September 5, 2024
The Heroic Struggle To Find Tiny Faults
What the teachers strike is really about
This Saskatchewan teachers strike is about something no one wants to say openly.
Passing kids who should have failed, mainstreaming everyone, overcrowding and not enough ESL are all part of “classroom complexity.” But we’ve had ample warning this was going to happen, from a guy I’ve known for 30 years. He wrote a book about this in 2010.
Believe it or not, I used to write opinion columns for 28 years on everything under the sun before launching Pipeline Online. And this teachers strike in Saskatchewan got under my skin enough that I had to write about it.
Grave Error
At the Western Standard;
Having lived at two residential schools when he was a university student in the mid-sixties, Clifton is Canada’s senior statesman about indigenous affairs.
He and Professor Rouillard take us from ground-zero at KIRS two and a half years ago, when the suggestion of burials had some mandarins, journalists and pundits convinced that it was a mass grave containing pupils from the school.
This revelation initiated a spiral of false claims which shook the world and caused moral panic among Canadians the likes of which has not been seen since the last world war.
And yet there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations that otherwise benign people, priests, nuns, teachers and staff at residential schools across Canada had a hand in malfeasance.
In fact, in every chapter, Grave Error puts the boots to false allegations. The handful of exhumations that have taken place — mind you, not at KIRS — have given up not so much as a missing shoelace.