AI firms are buying and shredding rare books as courts weigh fair use
AnnaCiaunica · x · 2026-07-28
AI companies are reportedly buying rare books at scale, scanning them on machines that remove the spines, and shredding the originals afterward. A service called ISBNdb handles bulk orders of up to a million books while keeping buyers anonymous. Older pre-2022 books have become especially valuable because they are less likely to contain AI-generated text, and a federal judge has ruled the practice fair use because only one copy exists at a time after the originals are destroyed. Anthropic also hired Google Books’ former partnerships chief to help obtain "all the books in the world."
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