July 31, 2026
Spines snapped, tempers too
AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books
Book lovers are horrified, but the comments are fighting over whether this is scandal or clickbait
TLDR: AI firms are reportedly cutting apart and scanning huge numbers of physical books, including older titles, to train chatbots. Readers are split between horror over possible cultural loss and skepticism that the article is exaggerating ordinary book disposal into an AI scandal.
The big shocker here is simple: companies feeding artificial intelligence are allegedly buying huge piles of printed books, slicing off the spines, scanning every page, and tossing the originals. The most eyebrow-raising detail is that sellers are reportedly being told to call it "digital preservation" instead of, well, "AI company destroys two million books". That alone was enough to send readers into full library-horror-movie mode.
But the comment section did what comment sections do best: turn one outrage into three different civil wars. One camp was furious about the idea of rare, older, and hard-to-find books being pulped so chatbots can sound smarter. Another camp immediately hit the brakes and demanded receipts: were these actually rare treasures, or just dusty old textbooks nobody wanted? Several commenters basically said the article was written to make people mad, with one pointing to an Ars Technica report that was far less dramatic and said court documents did not clearly show rare books were destroyed.
Then came the hottest take of all: maybe the real villain is copyright law itself. One commenter argued that even if scanners handled books like museum artifacts, the law could still force the original to be destroyed after copying. Others were blunter: people throw away mountains of books every year, so why is this suddenly sacred now? In other words, the internet could not decide whether this was a cultural crime, a legal absurdity, or just another case of people hating AI so much that every paper cut becomes a five-alarm fire.
Key Points
- •The article says AI companies and data suppliers are buying physical books in bulk and using destructive scanning, which involves cutting spines, scanning pages, and discarding the originals.
- •The article identifies ISBNdb as a company marketing bulk book acquisition and scanning services, including older, rare, and specialist volumes for AI training.
- •Booksellers in Europe and the United States reportedly observed a sharp rise in bulk orders for out-of-print and foreign-language titles.
- •The article cites court filings and internal documents alleging that Anthropic’s 2024 Project Panama used industrial equipment to scan millions of books.
- •The article says a federal judge ruled in the Anthropic copyright case that one-for-one digitization with destruction of the physical original qualified as transformative fair use.