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.
These people are barbarians. Philistines. As bad as destroying the library of Alexandria or Mongols burning libraries in Baghdad.
This knowledge is irreplaceable and it’s not worthless (if it was, they wouldn’t be scanning it.) If it were up to me this would be a capital crime. Not exaggerating for effect. Everyone involved would go for the long jump.
(To give credit where credit is due, apparently Musk does not shred books for his AI. He’s scum in many ways, but one should praise the correct actions of bad men.)
We all have a limited time here, to destroy that which could live much longer than us and speak of the past to the future is a monstrous crime.
Truly most of the people who run AI are scum.
What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
Egoculexegonos
Painful to read.
Species, languages and human heritage lost everywhere.
Don’t forget the shelling during the siege of Sarajevo which completely destroyed the National and University Library. Some rare and unique books managed to be saved by people (including journalists covering the event) who risked their own lives but most was lost in the fire.
Or Gaza libraries and archives.
Horrific bastards who consider themselves almighty and untouchable. What they consider tactical goals are paramount for these vermins.
mago
Amen.
StewartM
You beat me to this! Just saw this in my feed this morning.
This, dear readers, is nothing more than yet another act of enclosure–of taking what might be easily available and easily usable, and walling it off for profit. Deliberately introducing scarcity where there was none before. Moreover, making the material only usable if you PAY for access (the AI).
This is NOT “preservation”. I would applaud making digital copies, then carefully preserving the originals, if it were done to increase access. But not this crap.
And, making the material inaccessible if one doesn’t have computing devices or electricity. The irony is that the people who are destroying the planet and bringing about a possible collapse of our civilization are making damn sure that that the knowledge from which to rebuild it won’t be there.
Mark Level
Wow, Ian!! This was a real gut-punch to start my morning, just horrible beyond belief. It hits me personally as a retired MLIS who ran 2 libraries the last dozen years of my High School Teaching career.
When you mentioned the burning of Alexandria’s library, my mind immediately jumped to the rape and gang murder of Hypatia, a woman scholar and scientist, I think it was a roughly contemporary event, in any case both come from the same sick Anti-Intellectualism as my dad sometimes indulged in as a right wing, “common sense” (common ignorance) hater. I’ve told the story before, my dad got smarter in his 50s, rejected religion and a belief in an after-life. Around 2004 I was on vacation with the family, SCotUS was going to decide whether to take the Unconstitutional “one Nation under God” out of the Pledge of Subservience. Jerry, don’t you think this’ll be good?
My dad outraged, No, I don’t want that! Well if you’re an Un-Believer, Why?
“Those Pencil-Necked Lawyers (he meant Jews, not subtle) at the ACLU want that!!” The enemy of my enemy, etc.
Destroying Universal Cultural Heritage bad enough, think of when the Taliban blew up those Buddhist Statues, when the US during the illegal Iraq invasion let the Museums be looted, Rummy said no big deal, or when the Banderist thugs tore down the Catherine the Great UNESCO World Heritage Site to put in a pro-Nazism & Bandera monument.
But doing so so AI retard Slop can rewrite and recreate the destroyed data for commercial spam slop, unbelievably head-up-your-ass stupid!! Eating the seed corn stupid. . . Musk for once not a total scumbag; take your good news where you can.
Nota Bene– not posting much recently, very busy. I did a good comment on a great movie I recently saw, Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, German flick with international cast, What do we do (nothing for now) about economic inequality? Hilarious, weird metaphysics too. I included the Mubi platform’s review as a link too, a professional take alongside mine.
Also, Max Blumenthal did a banger interview with a New York Documentary filmmaker, Pritzger, about Netanyahu’s calls (not protested by the Biden Admin) for militarized cops to murder young protesters over the Gaza Genocide, just machine-gun them all, some years’ back, and more recent:
Loomer, Shapiro and all the Worst People in the World enraged that General Caine made DJT stop the serial bombing as the cupboards nearly bare. The Banderist nutcases are demanding US join that war, but in the meantime, US taking away US-gifted missiles (& maybe the EU’s as well? it is Trump) to move to Mideast, in desperation, and Ukraine collapsing. The Donald now loves him some Cocaine Comedian however, is being overruled. See the link below–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBbGLewZOP4
Oakchair
Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text
—–
Anyone else have their eyes rise when this was nonchalantly admitted? No big deal we just can’t use books after 2022 to train AI because they’re too invested with AI.
—–
They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation
—-
The ruling class and their professional managers only act dumb and clueless for the TV; in private they know exactly what they are doing.
Feral Finster
“Truly most of the people who run AI are scum.”
What does anyone propose to do about it? Who is going to stop them?
“Anything that can be done, will be done.”
Brian M
The people destroying books have never been on the right side of history or any given issue. NEVER.
Barbarians? Philistines? Yes. But these words are not enough. They cannot convey the disgust and contempt that one should have for these… creatures.
Purple Library Guy
Those vile parasitic worms.
Mark Level
Great take Egocul/etcetera, you prompted me to look up the #s of the Palestinian diaspora, nearly 10 million worldwide. With luck when the ZAE (Zionist Apartheid Entity) is broken-up in less than a decade half or more will come home and rebuild. Don’t want to language-police (but Ian no longer writes “reign” for “rein in”), vermin with no s is already plural. Yes, they’re vermin.
Stewart M, I think you are somewhat correct but then again. I’ve learned my local history here in Santa Fe, Northern New Mexico since moving here nearly a year ago. The federated Indian nations had a major event, The Pueblo Revolt in 1680, kind of the Native Oct. 7, drove whitey out for better part of a dozen years. There was only one group of traitors (see the Jordanian King now) that sided with the Whites, got the 4 boys taking the knotted rope around to the 20+ area Pueblos killed, the Chief who planned the coordinated it just launched it one day earlier, a success. They rebuilt, saved enough of their culture that now the majority of languages, culture, lore, history preserved. Oh, and now I have to add 32 years to the time we Hispanics were here in North America, 106 + 32 years means we were hablando Espanyol aqui at least 138 years before Ainglish spoken. And we’re still here Bruce Wilder, you can snigger at the deaths of Rene Good and Alex Pretti and random Texans driving while brown, but you cannot exterminate us all. Our language is alive, I speak Spanish todos los dias, chingale, racista jodido, existimos. And we can understand Italian and Portuguese too!! Oh, and Forecasting Intelligence on here only once a year (Blizzard of Oddddzzzz gone, thank you Ian) said he loved what the ZAE doing in the 1980s, the Guatemalan Genocide of 200,000 or so indigenas. Guess what, they’re mostly back. See the Vietnamese as well.
Oakchair, great info as usual, I will eschew books published in ’22 and after in the future.
I will disagree with you on the “they just act stupid” piece, however. 2 displays. 1. George W. Bush, a Smirking Chimp, same could be said of the Donald, both have college transcripts under permanent lock and key. 2. Kaja Kallas, as I shared recently, she recently said into a mic with an audience, “What? China was in World War II? I Never heard that!!? I mean it’s far from Estonia, but still the world’s largest civilization. Now, when she lies that “Russia has invaded 29 sovereign nations and Nobody ever invaded them”, she’s just playing cunning and flat-out lying. Stupid people can do cunning. And she’s lost her looks recently, might be Brave but no longer “Stunning and”, getting a lot of innocent Ukros killed and getting Orwell’s face she deserves at least a decade + before reaching 50.
Can’t really rebut Finster, but can note you get the occasional Luigi Mangione outlier, so there is that.
Brian M, 100%. The Bradbury classic Farenheit 451, and then Michael Moore’s (when he still mattered) Faranheit 451.
Mark Level
Oh, Pueblo Revolt link for those interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt
And note I am cheering for the people who killed my ancestors, as they were on the Right Side of History. When I got here, a terrible Wave of Karma hit me, I had $5,000 worth of my Library stolen, my car improperly towed, the Apartment building gave me a $130 but the scumbag Tow Truck owner charged me $65 extra, new-in-town, over 65, just too good to resist. One of the movers who stole my Library stuff (he thought there was porn in it, there certainly was Erotica, the distinction up to the individual voyeur or reader.)
Nothing like that happened to me when I lived in Norcal. Only one of my great-aunts would tell me the truth of why Mom’s side were all brown, the rest were ashamed. I am 89% white Euro, proud of the Oirish 1/4, French, mixed viz the Spaniards they had a horrible legacy, but Spain now a “Tankie” country, anti-Empire. Mostly ashamed of the German 12%, but they did have great philosophers, scientists, poets, etc.
My 11% I realized recently is something we call “Triple-Eme” en espanyol. M=Eme. X= Eqquis. . . Diez porciento (10) Mediterraneo, (9% Castillian, 1% Sardinian, the mysterious “Sea People” before the Oddysey or the Illiad, mixed with but not really Italians) & 1% Mongol.
So the dude who stole my library named Mankiller. Obviously Native, I don’t begrudge him killing whites in the least, or my Brown AntePasados. I guess if he stole anything of value I was just paying racial reparations. During my first 3 months South of the Border, traveling from Texas to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, later back, I taught myself Spanish by reading the Noticias (Newspaper) and a book, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, La Verdadero Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva Espanya,” he was with Cortez all the way across Mexico, Honduras (means “the depths”, no gold, a quagmire waste of time, Cortez had a ship take him out a few weeks in, the troops had to flounder through nearly knee height mud and slow-march out after months), etc. DdC always commented on every village they conquered, Las Indias aqui estaban muy bonitas” or “muy feas”, mass-rapes to create the Mestizo “Raza.” Pretty gross. I didn’t know the history of mom’s side because of the shame, my grandmother jeered at Hi-Talians, but my Sardinian blood certainly not from dad’s side. So I have been Hispanic since at least Julio Cesar’s era, 22 centuries, don’t know if it goes back further than that another 8 centuries or so to when we were slave in the Romans’ tin-mines. We did enslave the Ecuadorans in tin-mines for at least 2 centuries, so Gandhi’s Eye-for-an-Eye cycles around for centuries.
I certainly had ancestors who were Conquistadores (again, we were here long before the other Euros, even the precious snooty Brits), I now believe I was likely a Conquistador once for every 2 times I was an Indigena (my Irish blood) getting partially genocided. So some shit rained down on me, I don’t go as far as to say “Everything happens for a reason,” but I’ll admit some did to me.
I’ve had past-life, hair rising on my back intimations twice in my life. Once in Salamanca, Spain, walking on a Roman Road and having seen Roman aqueducts on the train there, “I have lived here before.” 2nd time when I was coming South thru Colorado (Colorful) and saw what looked like a perfectly square fortress on a high mountain coming South. I thought, If I marched past that, my past would’ve told me it was a fortress, we had to march up and attack it. A wasted effort!! Live and learn.
bruce wilder
A remarkably relevant substack essay:
https://open.substack.com/pub/quyma/p/the-retrieval-canon-ai-is-the-new?
AI is the new research librarian, responsible not just for retrieval but finding and summarizing.
I have been “researching” deflation as a kind of hobby project since last Summer. My original goal was to edit the Wikipedia article(s). I don’t make much progress, but I do learn things about the arts of polemics and agnatology.
Monetary theory is a fetid swamp, with a thin and patchy analytic consensus and lots of useful idiots willing to satisfy the casual curiosity of fools by making clear, declarative sentences encompassing normative judgments.
Need a source? Need a footnote? We’ve got you!
Need to understand the past? Need to understand what you are talking about? You’re up the creek without a paddle, I think.
I’d feel better about AI if I thought that it could “reason” or that it would be allowed to reason by the unreasonable principals sponsoring these boondoggles. Reasoning by humans about the intersection of economic activity and monetary policy has been remarkably dishonest and stupid, so the ideal of an honest machine has appeal. It seems an expectation unlikely of realization. But, practically every misleading generalization and speculative rationalization possible has been ventured into print already and the sorting out of quality and authority is highly imperfect, even assuming the meta-judgments can be accessed, correlated with the sources judged, and applied in AI-generated summaries to shape the superficial understanding of historical experience absorbed by politicians and undergraduates everywhere.
Deflation, I think, is justly feared by people concerned with monetary policy, but that fear is under constant assault in an intellectual war of attrition that parallels the assault waged by practical experience with regimes that err too predictably on the side of inflation. Academic integrity is too depleted to rescue the situation. AI integrity? Are you joking?
Scanning vast libraries is more than 20 years old. My alma mater, the University of Michigan, embarked on a project that put most collections online around 2004 and it is long since a done deal. It did not destroy the hard copies, but mostly evacuated them. A huge construction project has been submitted for approval to permanently store the rapidly growing millions of physical volumes whose scanning has been completed.
To “discover” in 2026 that libraries are mulching their collections at this late date seems like empty virtue-signaling by liberals whose politics feature the memories of May flies or goldfish.
Jessica
The court decision is errant nonsense. The AI companies will scan the books they destroy, then make any number of copies.
It also shows the perversity of current intellectual property (IP) law, which makes it illegal to preserve the original.
spud
the era of scarcity is here. as long as one copy is left, the capitalists are allowed to self govern.
please attribute to spud if you share this song.
WE’RE THE CAPITALISTS AND YOU THINK WE ARE DUMB, BUT HEY, IF YOU WANT THE MOST SHORT TERM DISASTER, WE CAN GET IT DONE!
WE’RE THE CAPITALISTS AND YOU THINK WE ARE DUMB, HEY, WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN SOCIALISM, LET THE MARKETS GET IT DONE!
WE’RE THE CAPITALISTS AND YOU THINK WE ARE DUMB, WE DEMAND A SOCIALIST BAILOUT, AFTER ALL, YOU LET US BE DUMB!
i have more, but it takes a while for my brain to recall.
——–
In the 1990s, deregulation contributed to a shift in economic policies, leading to increased competition and changes in market dynamics, which some interpreted as a declaration of an era of scarcity. This period saw significant changes in financial markets, including the rise of new investment strategies and a focus on efficiency.
George Washington University Wikipedia
Deregulation in the 1990s
Deregulation in the 1990s played a crucial role in transforming economic policies and market dynamics. This period was marked by significant changes that influenced financial markets and investment strategies.
Impact of Deregulation
Increased Competition: Deregulation led to a more competitive environment, particularly in financial markets. This competition encouraged innovation and efficiency among firms.
New Investment Strategies: The deregulated landscape allowed for the emergence of new investment strategies, which were more focused on maximizing returns in a competitive market.
Market Dynamics: The changes in regulations shifted how markets operated, leading to a focus on efficiency and profitability.
Era of Scarcity
The phrase “era of scarcity” reflects the perception that, despite increased competition, resources were becoming limited. This sentiment arose as firms sought to optimize their operations in a more competitive environment, leading to concerns about resource allocation and availability.
Overall, the deregulation of the 1990s significantly reshaped Wall Street and the broader economic landscape, fostering a new era characterized by both opportunities and challenges.
The White House George Washington University
Deregulation in the 1990s, particularly the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, led to increased risk-taking and the merging of investment and commercial banking, which contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. This era saw Wall Street firms engage in irresponsible lending and high-risk financial practices, ultimately resulting in significant economic losses and a severe recession.
The Globalist Cato Institute
The 1990s deregulation, including the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, expanded financial sector activities by allowing commercial and investment banks to merge, which increased market complexity and interconnectedness. This period also saw rising home prices, increased mortgage borrowing, and a shift toward more sophisticated financial instruments, contributing to the housing bubble and subsequent 2007–2009 financial crisis.
Cato Institute Federal Reserve History
mago
This is a manifestation of the dark age for sure. History is littered with examples such as Alexandria as mentioned in other comments. The burning of books and witches has a long tradition as well as the destruction of culture. This 21st century example of greed , destruction and stupidity may or may not be chronicled by future generations. Whether it is or not, the madness will repeat until the realms attain enlightenment.
In the meantime. . .
Been busy in the kitchen while contemplating all this and reading comments. I quit cooking for money and the public years ago, btw, but I’ll keep it up until my boots are in the air, just as my love of writing and literature will endure until my dying days, no matter what the dark enlightenment AI boys and girls do or say.
So, to stray from the topic once again, I, too, devoured Bernal Diaz’ Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru at ages 20 and 21 while kicking it in Mexico and Guatemala. It goes without saying Mark Level that we’ve been there before. Lots of Latin American karma, obviously. Spanish and Northern European as well. I clearly remember walking down abandoned railroad tracks one night in the woods outside Nijmegen en het Nederland, and thinking I’ve been here before. Unquestionably. Just wanted to mention that.
Cause and effect is a true thing even if one’s nihilistic views would deny it.
Keep an open heart in a world on fire. Keep on kicking it brothers and sisters.
shagggz
Mark: Michael Moore made the documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11, Fahrenheit 451 is an unrelated work about book-burning.
Bill
“Where they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings”
Heinrich Heine in his 1821 play Almansor:
Remembered this quote, looked it up on the internet and AI came back – irony
Dagnarus
“This knowledge is irreplaceable and it’s not worthless (if it was, they wouldn’t be scanning it.)”
To be fair. I’m pretty certain that the value in them scanning and shredding the books comes from the ability to make an investor pitch about having the last remnants of some arcane knowledge in there LLM, not from anything useful the LLM can do thereby (ironically I think the shredding is a feature here).
This is not a defense of what they are doing by any means. It is heinous.
Egoculexegonos
Thanks for the “vermin” heads-up, Mark Level. I always like to learn about all aspects of language so you can “language-police” me at your discretion.
When I wrote it, I first considered using “vermin” because “vermins” sounded off to me but the previous “these” interfered. Had not much time, quickly checked https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vermin#English where you can spot “vermins” but failed to see the foregoing “sg or pl”. It still sounded wrong to me but I added the s. I’ve just checked and the use of “vermins” in literature is a wild minority indeed: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=vermin%2Cvermins&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 … This last link is, btw, tangentially related to the topic of Ian’s post.
Like & Subscribe
Books subsumed the muse for the most part and the Net is consuming books for the most part. Books were the internet of that place and time.
Jan Wiklund
Sorry to say, but most digital books are hid behind paywalls. There is a whole business, called academic publishers, who print a hundred copies and sell them for a hundred dollars each. Then they put a pdf behind their paywall and let you look into it for some tenners.
A decade ago some European countries tried to sue them, after all the authors of these books were usually university people paid by the state. Since university people have to publish or perish they had no bargaining power against these parasites, so their university libraries had to pay the exorbitant fee to get the book back.
The states mentioined above didn’t like it, but since the academic publishers still go on with their robber baron practices I suppose there was no law against it.
Of course it is not exactly the same crime as the AI businesses commit, the few books they printed are still there with the university libraries that could afford them. But really, the old practice of at least some thousand copies at a reasonable price was better.