AI companies are buying rare books, scanning them, and shredding the originals
fredahshi · x · 2026-07-28
This post highlights a controversial data-sourcing pipeline: AI companies are allegedly bulk-buying rare books, cutting off the spines, scanning them, and shredding the originals.
- A service called ISBNdb is said to facilitate anonymous orders of up to a million books.
- Pre-2022 books are described as more valuable because they are free of AI-generated text.
- A federal judge has reportedly ruled the practice fair use, since destroying the original means only one copy exists at a time.
- The thread also notes that Anthropic hired Google Books’s former partnerships lead to help obtain “all the books in the world.”
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