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Derek McArthur

Library of Alexandria burns: AI companies are destroying books in bulk

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Artificial intelligence

Entertainment

Literature

By<br>Derek McArthur

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AI companies are paying for millions of books to be scanned and destroyed - and they'd rather you didn't know about it (Image: Anonymous/Derek McArthur)

This article is brought to you by our exclusive subscriber partnership with our sister title USA Today,<br>and has been written by our American colleagues.<br>It does not necessarily reflect the view of The Herald.

The artificial intelligence industry, having already stripped the open web of its bark and devoured every morsel of its illegally acquired libraries, has developed a new appetite. Millions of physical books are now being bought in bulk and fed into a process that the industry nervously calls “destructive scanning”.

Data acquisition increasingly involves cutting the spines from millions of books, scanning them and then shredding and discarding them afterward.

The service comes courtesy of a company called ISBNdb. They promise to obtain “up to one million titles per order.” They specifically tout “older, rare and specialist volumes” as premium training data because books from the pre-2022 era are “structurally guaranteed” to be free of AI contamination. As AI starts to feed on itself into a delirious loop, information from the old world becomes more valuable to the momentum and continuation of large language models.

Read more about AI and the arts from Derek McArthur:

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The company's marketing material is blunt about the reality of what happens to the books. "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," its website states. It offers non-disclosure agreements to buyers and advises them to frame the work as "digital preservation".

We are talking about books that have survived through the many scourges of history and have become rare due to their life as an obscurity before the information age.

Small booksellers across Europe and the United States have noticed a sudden surge in bulk orders for rare and out-of-print titles. One bookseller told 404 Media that he went from selling about 20 books a week to hundreds, including hard-to-find foreign language works. "It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell," he said. "On the other hand, I don't like the end-use, and I don't like that uncommon books are being pulped."

Okay, and on the other hand, these things cannot be replaced. Once a final non-digitised copy of a book is shredded, it’s gone forever. And the version that is digitised becomes at the mercy of AI interpretation rather than a straight, accurate representation of the work.

A collection of rare books and manuscripts at Oxford University (Image: Getty)

Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, has been a major driver of this practice. Internal documents made public during a copyright lawsuit revealed a program called “Project Panama” launched in 2024. Court filings described an industrial-scale operation using a "hydraulic powered cutting machine" to slice the spines off millions of books, which were then fed through "high speed, high quality, production level scanners". An internal memo called it "our effort to disruptively scan all the world's books" and noted, "we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project." Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books specifically to help acquire what the company described as "all the books in the world".

The legal framework enabling this comes from a federal judge's ruling in the Anthropic copyright case. The court determined that by making a digital copy and destroying the physical original in a one-for-one transfer, the process qualifies as "transformative" and falls under fair use...