July 27, 2026
Open the book, kill the book
AI companies are shredding rare books
Readers are horrified, skeptics are shrugging, and the comments are on fire
TLDR: AI firms are reportedly buying books, cutting them apart to scan them, and destroying the originals, and a judge says the practice can be legal. Commenters are split between outrage over cultural vandalism and cold-eyed skepticism asking whether rare treasures are really being sacrificed at all.
The internet has officially entered its "are we the villains?" era. The story: AI companies are reportedly buying huge piles of books, slicing the spines off, scanning them at high speed, and trashing the originals to train their software. A judge says this can count as fair use because once the paper copy is destroyed, there is still only one usable copy at a time. That legal detail sent commenters into full meltdown mode, especially because the article claims even rare books may be ending up in the machine. For many readers, this wasn’t just business news — it felt like a cultural horror story.
But the comments? Pure chaos. One camp compared it to Fahrenheit 451, while another said the better reference is a sci-fi "shred and scan" factory from Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. Others immediately started poking holes in the panic: Wait, which rare books were actually destroyed? How can an 18th-century book still be under copyright? That skepticism fueled a big fight between people mourning the loss of physical history and people saying, basically, calm down, the words matter more than the paper.
Then came the spicy economics takes. One commenter all but laughed that publishers tried to force giant licensing deals, only to get "analog hole’d" by companies buying used books for cheap and scanning them instead. So now the thread is split between book funeral energy, legal nitpicking, and dark jokes about building smarter chatbots by feeding them literary roadkill.
Key Points
- •The article says AI companies are buying books in bulk, scanning them with destructive machines, and destroying the physical originals.
- •It reports that ISBNdb facilitates purchases of up to one million books and keeps buyers anonymous.
- •The article states that pre-2022 books are considered more valuable for training because they are free of AI-generated text.
- •It says a federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because destruction of the original leaves only one copy at a time.
- •The article reports that Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to help acquire large numbers of books.