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AI companies are shredding rare books
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Overview
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one c...
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Hacker News · twitter.com
Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-07-27.
- Praise: Scanning and digitizing old books can accelerate historical research, giving historians access to material that was previously hard to find.
- Praise: Destructively scanning books could be seen as a practical solution to preserve content digitally, especially for works still under copyright.
- Concern: Shredding irreplaceable texts for AI training is not just unethical; it raises serious concerns about the future of rare books.
- Concern: The practice of AI companies buying and destroying books for cheaper training data reflects a disturbing trend that prioritizes profit over preserving cultural heritage.
- Concern: There’s a growing skepticism that AI companies genuinely care about the value of the material they’re destroying, treating it merely as a means to an end.