If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.
Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said. “I’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
Rare booksellers across Europe are seeing a similar surge in purchase requests which they suspect are coming from AI labs in America.
Pieter de Vries, an antiquarian bookseller in Haarlem, recently received an email from a person identifying herself as Nataly from Singapore-based company 2077AI, Dutch news site BNR reported.
The woman wrote that the company was undertaking a “a new project focused on collecting books in multiple languages, currently mainly in English”. “We have compiled a very extensive list of editions that we are currently trying to acquire, and we plan to place a fairly large order,” the email said.
The attached list contained 3000 English-language titles organised by ISBN number, ranging from books on fairytales and folklore to technical manuals and science texts.
Media outlets in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Germany report booksellers have received nearly identical requests, per NL Times.
Booksellers believe the purchase requests were unrelated to collecting or resale due to the obscure, highly specialised nature of the titles, concluding they were being used to train AI models.
Large language models (LLMs) that power AI tools like ChatGPT until now have mainly been trained on vast datasets that include internet data, licensed books and articles, code repositories and human feedback.
But with much of the content available online now exhausted — and increasingly polluted with poor-quality, AI-generated writing — AI labs are turning to uncorrupted texts published pre-2022.
One company, ISBNdb, which boasts that it has the “world’s largest book database”, now offers bulk book buying for AI labs, “up to one million titles per order”, including of “older, rare and specialist volumes”.
“The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” it states on its website.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
Anthropic, the Google-backed firm behind Claude, and Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, have previously been sued in US courts for downloading millions of pirated books to feed into their AI models.
Last week, a federal court in the US signed off on Anthropic’s landmark $US1.5 billion ($2.15 billion) settlement in a copyright class action brought by a group of authors who accused the company of misusing their books. It’s one of dozens of similar cases brought against AI firms in the US, and the first to settle.
While that case was still unfolding, Anthropic was hatching a new plan to avoid similar copyright headaches, dubbed “Project Panama”.
Beginning in early 2024, the AI lab quietly launched an industrial-scale book-buying program, partnering with used-book wholesalers to acquire millions of paper books by the pallet for what internal documents — which became public last year during the copyright lawsuit — described as “destructive scanning”, where books’ spines are cut apart so the pages can be scanned and then discarded.
Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.
Court documents detailed how the AI lab used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to “neatly cut” millions of books before scanning the pages “on high speed, high quality, production level scanners”.
The Anthropic copyright case set the precedent — the US court ruled that by making a digital copy and destroying the physical in a one-for-one transfer, the process is deemed “transformative” and therefore protected by fair use.
“Anthropic kept Project Panama confidential, not because it was illegal, but because it looked bad,” ISBNdb says in an article on its website. “Destroying millions of books evokes images of burning libraries, even if the law was on their side.”
ISBNdb, like other bulk buying services, promises to keep AI buyers anonymous, noting that “the optics problem is real”. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” it states, while arguing that “the framing of destruction as vandalism mistakes the nature of what is actually happening”.
“A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information,” it continues.
“Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.”
SpaceX founder and rival AI developer Elon Musk, for his part, said he was opposed to the practice of destructive scanning.
“I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning,” he wrote on his social media site X.
Now Australian book dealers are urging Anthony Albanese to protect local titles from the practice, under the Prime Minister’s newly announced Office for AI.
Announcing the new national strategy earlier this month, the PM sought to calm fears from arts and news industries about the impact of AI.
“Not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs. Not at all,” he told reporters.
“Australian writers, musicians, artists, and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out plain as day.”
Dawn Albinger, president of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB), said members were “aware of the flood of orders that some of our American and European colleagues are experiencing, but to date there have been no confirmed reports of this happening in Australia”.
“Perhaps the tyranny of distance and the cost of shipping is one reason why we haven’t seen it yet,” Ms Albinger, owner of Queensland’s largest second-hand bookstore Archive Books, told news.com.au. “It is certainly an issue that we are keeping an eye on.”
She noted that US copyright law and its definition of fair use was different to that in Australia.
“The recent announcement by the Prime Minister about an AI policy for Australia may reduce the likelihood of this happening here in the event that an Australian-based AI is developed,” she said.
The ANZAAB is particularly concerned about the “disappearance of uncommon and potentially rare material”.
“We are committed to the preservation of books and printed works on paper as culturally significant objects,” Ms Albinger said.
“There are so many stories of discovery, [for example] notes left in margins by first-hand witnesses that correct historical accounts, or manuscripts found in the binding material of books published much later. And then there is the pure romance of holding a book that has been signed or inscribed by the author. There are things that cannot be examined and properly understood unless the physical object is to hand.”
Australian Booksellers Association (ABA) chief executive Susannah Bowen also expressed concern. “Books are how humans learn, discover and engage with ideas — whether printed books, audiobooks or e-books,” she said.
“When content is extracted from books to train AI models it raises very significant ethical and legal concerns. It also strips away the structure, context and meaning intended by the author, undermining the integrity of the creative work, and reducing the viability of a healthy book industry.”
Australian Publishers Association (APA) chief executive Patrizia Di Biase-Dyson said, “The lengths AI companies are going to acquire books demonstrate just how valuable professionally written, edited and published material is to the future of AI. That value should be recognised through permission, licensing and fair payment to the authors and publishers who created it.”