AI companies are quietly buying up millions of old books and pulping them right after scanning

[Poppy96]

Decrypt picked up a 404 Media report today about a strange cottage industry that has sprung up around AI training data, companies are anonymously buying physical books in bulk through intermediaries, slicing the spines off, scanning every page, and then just discarding what is left of the original book once the digitisation is done

The intermediary angle is what makes this feel deliberately hidden rather than incidental, these sourcing companies specifically advertise that they can locate hundreds of thousands of titles while promising confidentiality for whichever AI lab is paying, which tells you the buyers know exactly how this looks and would rather not have their name attached to it publicly

The logic behind the buying spree comes down to timing, anything published before generative AI really took off in 2023 is considered more valuable training data precisely because it is guaranteed human written rather than diluted by what people are now calling AI slop, so older and more obscure books are becoming a scarce resource in a way nobody expected books to become scarce again

One bookseller quoted in the original reporting said their weekly sales jumped from about 20 books to several hundred once AI buyers showed up, which is obviously good for business and for clearing out inventory that otherwise never moves, but the same seller admitted discomfort with uncommon and out of print titles effectively vanishing forever once they get scanned and pulped

This is not some rogue fringe practice either, it echoes Anthropic's own Project Panama book scanning operation, and a federal judge in San Francisco already ruled in the Bartz v Anthropic case that destructively scanning legally purchased physical books counts as transformative fair use, with courts reaching similar conclusions in separate cases involving OpenAI and Meta, so there is now real legal cover for exactly this kind of destruction

Anthropic is dealing with the other side of this coin at the same time though, a federal judge in that same district just approved a 1.5 billion dollar settlement requiring the company to pay roughly 3,000 dollars per book to thousands of authors whose work was used from pirated copies rather than purchased ones, and even Elon Musk has publicly pushed back on the destructive method, saying his own team has been told to preserve rare books in a library and scan them properly rather than just cutting off the spine

AI Book Burning? Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books to Feed Chatbots - Decryptdecrypt.co

[NightOwl]

The confidentiality promise from the sourcing companies is the tell here, nobody hides a purchase they're actually proud of, that detail alone tells you everyone involved knows this looks bad

[Anthony]

Legally it's fair use per the ruling though, uncomfortable optics and legal permissibility are just two completely separate questions that don't have to align

[GlassKnight35]

Right but fair use covering the scanning doesn't mean anyone has to also destroy the physical copy afterward, that part feels like a purely cost driven choice rather than anything legally required

[ForumGremlin93]

Probably storage and logistics, keeping millions of physical books around after scanning them costs real warehouse space and money, destroying them is just the cheaper option once the data is extracted

[Sequence]

Musk's rare books in a library comment is a rare moment of him landing on the actually reasonable side of an AI ethics debate, did not expect that outcome going into this thread

[Ava82]

The bookseller's own quote sums up the whole situation better than any outside commentary could, benefits financially, dislikes the end use, keeps selling anyway, that tension isn't going away for anyone in that supply chain

[TechPriest]

Genuinely worried about what specific rare or foreign language titles are quietly disappearing in all this, once a book like that gets pulped there's no guarantee any other physical copy exists anywhere

[IdleWarden]

Please stop this practice. I'm devastated as a book reader. Donate them back to the publisher if you must, they can donate them to charities/schools/libraries or the homeless