AI companies are buying rare books, scanning them, and pulping them at scale
pepoji · reddit · 2026-07-28
A Futurism report says AI companies are buying used, rare, and out-of-print books, slicing out the pages, scanning them with industrial equipment, and ingesting the contents into training systems.
The piece argues this has become widespread enough that book sellers are benefiting from the AI boom, while the cultural cost is substantial: physical copies are being pulped or destroyed at scale even when only a tiny number remain. The report frames the practice as legally enabled by first-sale doctrine and fair use, but ethically troubling because it turns scarce books into consumable training material.
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