AI companies are bulk‑buying rare books, scanning them through high‑speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding weakening the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to one 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 copy exists at a time.

Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.” The business model is described as “digital preservation,” with NDAs and a headline that says “AI company destroys two million books” is not a sympathy‑triggering story. Authors of rare texts that survived wars, fires, and centuries are being shredded so an AI can learn to write better marketing emails. Unlike reversible scraping, this is irreversible: you can re‑upload a website or reprint a bestseller, but you cannot replace the last three copies of an 18th‑century botanical text once it is shredded. The judge’s ruling means the practice will accelerate.