AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
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News<br>AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
Emanuel Maiberg
Jul 21, 2026<br>at 9:51 AM
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
Photo by Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash
As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.<br>“The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”
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