AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them, then shredding the originals
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-27
The post quotes a report that AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them on high-speed machines that cut off the spines, and shredding the originals. The cited piece says ISBNdb can handle orders of up to a million books anonymously, that pre-2022 books are prized because they lack AI-generated text, and that a federal judge ruled the process fair use because only one copy exists at a time. It also says Anthropic hired a former Google Books partnerships lead to source “all the books in the world.”
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