The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed.

These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.

It is also the case that the copyright holders are often putting restrictions around use of electronic forms that are driving the desire to use physical copies. I doubt AI companies would use a single physical book if they could avoid it - absent the legal cloud over electronic rights.

I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to force AI companies back to e-books where they can force them into licensing deals.

Yes. I dont understand at all what AA is worried about. One copy of a book is no big deal? good will and used book stores throw out a lot more than that.

> Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy.

The OP article sounds quite opposite though - that AI companies are doing exactly this - destroying books so only they have the scanned content.

They also only scan books that are easily and cheaply available, which means they are either not rare or have no significance.

Books that are rare of have historic significance will surely be in museums or libraries and not going away for pennies.

RE "...Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest...."

Why are AI companies forced to shred books?

Copyright holders are certainly responsible for keeping unavailable works inaccessible, but shredding is mostly an industrial scanning decision, not a copyright requirement

If only this complaint was being posted by an organization ideologically opposed to copyright itself!

> Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.

What? Even if there are no copyright holders, the AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap.

Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or not.

Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way?

Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.

We the people in the society who have the power to make laws through democratic means are the ones locking these books up.

They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.

"want to ingest"

Not "need to ingest"

Copyright holders are capitalizing on laws on the books just like Jeff Bezos companies buying their own copies to shred

So in the end it's really a Congress problem as usual

mr. vernor-vinge's "Rainbows End" is oddly prescient ! Highly recommended nevertheless.

If you're buying second hadn books by the lot, you'll get a lot of duplicates and its eaiser to scan wholesale and dedupe in the computers than it is to try to run a sorting operataion on "things".

> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.

Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.

It's also the regulation, where most systems still look at "one pirate copy" = "one sale of lost profits", especially when pirates end up in court. If the book (or game or whatever) is not sold anymore in any way where you could give the copyright holder money in an easy accessible way (eg. buy it on amazon, or a local bookstore), they shouldn't be able to claim losses from piracy, since they clearly don't want your money.

On the other hand, there are grey zones here, the lord of the rings books (still copyrighted and easily obtained pretty much everywhere) have been translated into my language many decades ago, and many of us read and liked those translations, but when the movies came out, a new translator did a new translation, where they changed a lot of things, including the last names of bilbo and frodo (Bogataj->Bisagin) and the Shire (Grofija->Šajerska), and the old version is sadly available only in paper form on second hand markets. On one hand, copying that if you only want this specific version would not cause a lost sale, on the other, you can get new translations (or english originals) pretty much everywhere.

Copyright allows you to sell book you have and does not force you to shread it.

They are not forced to shread them by copyright.

this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

I was wondering what the pro book shredding take was going to be. Why destroy the book after scanning? You can create a beautiful library of rare books with all the AI debt bubble.

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You can donate with over 20 different payment methods after making an anonymous account.

https://annas-archive.gl/donate

Anna's archive is selling data to AI companies. They're essentially saying "hey, don't sell your books to be scanned by AI companies, scan them yourself, and give us the data, so we can sell it to AI companies."

It's an excellent play by them, using moral outrage to the benefit of the project. When life gives you lemons...

Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.

I think is the scanning for profit and destroying them in the process that angries people.

If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential.

I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.

> copyright

This is what caused the problem in the first place. If people had unrestricted access to content then the world would be a better place. And works wouldn't be so rare that it's worth AI companies buying and destroying them to gain some edge, as well as remain in legal compliance.

> Is the corpus of human knowledge useful for high quality AI training now essentially frozen in time?

No. They also use lots of other methods to get training data.

No but with 100% clean data you can easily train a model to filter ai generated content.

As a rule: all high quality text is useful.

There's no "2022 split", and the "untouched by machines" bit came from the marketing blurb of a company offering book scanning services - not the AI labs themselves.

At the AI lab level: the book scanning seems to be driven by copyright concerns, not data contamination concerns. There was a concern about AI contamination, but there's no measurable performance loss from ingesting post-2022 data with minimal filtration, and some tests attribute small but persistent performance gains to post-2022 AI contamination. It's unclear where exactly do those gains come from.

Why is all high quality text useful? The "inverse problem" framing is that all text reflects the thinking behind it, somewhat, and by learning to reproduce it, LLMs implicitly learn to reproduce some of the thought process too. They don't just memorize the dry factual knowledge, but also learn how that knowledge fits together, and how to reason about that knowledge - both in the specific case and in general. And that "in general" then surfaces in an LLM's ability to generalize. Which is very desirable.

"You own a particular physical copy; you don't possess an abstract transferable 'one-copy license."

There is nothing that says you have to destroy something because you scanned it. This argument has been confusing me since I've seen this pop up.

Edit; despite the above, looking at the court documents from the Anthropic case, this is pretty close to what they were arguing: “we are just transferring the physical form we purchased, therefore it is legal.”

I still dont think there is a requirement to destroy the book, but since there isn’t a reason to store the book and they can’t sell it, they probably just took the cheapest route. It might be worth an argument that they only purchased the right to use the digital copies while the physical copies exist, but I’m in over my head from a copyright standpint

Since when do AI companies care about the law? Most of their training data is pirated.

>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.

> physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write

there have been many times I've wanted to pay for an ebook but found that the only places that sell it apply DRM to it, so shadow library it is

>On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people.

Which exists to enrich Disney and other large corps, while they hide behind artists as a human shield.

>Artists need some form of reward.

Right, as do artists who use the work of other artists as their starting point. Copyright holders aren't bill and bob artist, they are massive corporate trolls throwing around the weight of almost 100 years of our cultural heritage, sucking the marrow from its bones.

>On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.

The books are getting digitised into a permanent record of all our cultural heritage. It just sucks we don't have control over it. If only there was a way we could get them digitised AND control our cultural heritage. HMMMMMMM.

>Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write.

The incentive to write is being killed by slop groups like 20Booksto50K and Kindle which predate AI by at least a decade. AI just lets them work faster.

>We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free

Excellent

>But there would be no human writers left.

Unlikely, but there would definitely be no Disneys or Conde Nasts left, which is a massively pro social outcome.

>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

In a world with all books digitised and accessible to read? A huge huge huge incentive. I already partake if books are too expensive where I am. It would take me the rest of my life to read all the books I already want to read. What kind of inane dribble is the idea that copyright makes it interesting to read? I havent even read all of Howard and he's in the public domain (in cool countries at least)

I entirely believe the litigation brought against Internet Archive was secretly sponsored by these exact organizations, because they want to monopolize information to train models.

No data => No models => No competition.

The outraged people don't care. They hate AI, and so anything surrounding AI that can be evil is evil. Books are good, AI destroys books, AI is bad.

Furthermore, they like that AI is bad. Because they think it's bad, and being right feels good.

And the solution to the water issues can be found in any introductory textbook on the subject: a water price.

> People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book.

Please pardon the tangent: that's what always bothered me about the Borg in Star Trek. Why do they need to assimilate whole species? I'm sure there are enough volunteers in the federation that would join the Borg collective. Even a handful should be enough.

Its nuanced and complicated but its not fully without reason. I think there would be a compromise of using those books while playing the "we're helping preserve them part" but I don't think that even crosses the mind of most Ai CEOs in an honest way.

The crux of the issue is that it is mostly a PR problem. AI is amazing but being promoted, in the eyes of many, by the worst people imaginable. Very akin, and overlapping in many ways to the crypto crowd.

I don't know how it works today, but 20 years ago bookstores wouldn't return unsold books (too expensive to ship) but would simply tear the covers off and throw them in the garbage.

They pulp books that have many copies surplus to requirement, not the last few copies in second hand book shops.

What if people like food more than AI? Have you considered that?

More and more I feel like anti-AI is a bigger bubble than AI. It seems like every week it expands into a new dimension - anti-Flock protesters tearing down years-old traffic cameras that were used for research into auto accidents, etc.

Like, the current thing in the news cycle is a poll that young people are now more worried than hopeful about AI. Which sounds scary, but my first thought is that one could find similar polls from the 80s and 90s about satanic cults or alien abduction..

They likely would not destroy the original books after scanning but apparently it's the legal way to do things because of copyright.

They are ordering books with ISBN. So I take that they are tracking what books they have scanned or pirated already and only picking up what they are missing. As just ordering mass bulk and getting 20 of the same encyclopaedia would be waste.

And I guess something like encyclopaedia would be good example of book they scan. At one point popular, but with most copies destroyed as no one actually wants them anymore.

Does it exist in the web at all? Could be the contents have not been scraped for the dataset yet.

Lossily stuffing books into a model through a training process has so far been deemed legal. Enabling piracy by giving away digital copies is not. The internet archive tried to give away digital copies and they got sued to hell and back (which they should've seen coming from miles away).

I'm sure they have some repository available somewhere. They can even sell the digital copies down the line if they're done with them (only once, of course).

Anna's archive estimates that they have preserved 16% of the world's books.

https://annas-archive.gl/faq

See https://annas-archive.gl/blog/worldcat-editions-and-holdings..., nearer the end

Yes, we know they're destroying the books. Whether this is actually a problem or another convenient "AI bad" trope remains to be seen.

https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-boo...

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Public libraries destroy unsold book donations all the time. I often tried to give away some old books I have online and nobody wants them. Some of these books have some nostalgic value to me so I hate to see them just get destroyed so they just lie in my shed.

Most old books aren't worth protecting, and the publishing industry destroys oodles of them as waste that no one wants.

Is this a reference to Fahrenheit 451?

Not everyone should scan stuff. If you spend any serious time looking through stuff that randos on the Internet have scanned the quality fits the Bell Curve perfectly.

Biggest problems:

  - scanning items that are bigger than the scanner platten so the start/end of every line is cut off.
  - becoming an "editor": scanning only the pages you think are interesting and skipping intros, forewords, title pages, copyright pages etc

Even the big libraries fuck up. I wanted an intact copy of Harper's Weekly from 1900 that has a big fold-out map in it. It's not clear to the libraries scanning this issue that the map is missing from their copies. None of the copies for sale from dealers have the map. Even when it is still glued into the middle it gets missed by industrial scanners. Google's scan only includes the (blank) back of the folded map.

Luckily GPT was able to track down a copy in a university special collections and fired off an email asking them to scan it. I just got the scan today:

https://imgur.com/a/vgMkM7b

(preview size, they sent a 500MB TIFF)

Now I can reassemble the issue and upload it.

I spend a lot of tokens getting LLMs vision tools to find the missing pages in vintage items and then try to reassemble them from other scans where available.

I'm also splitting up volumes to reupload. A lot of periodicals are only available online as giant multi-gig volume PDFs with all the issues in one file. I have a separate app I wrote to scan all the pages looking for covers so they can be split into PDFs and then identifying the volume/issue/month/year data from the cover or title page.

In the context of books, "scanning" is now more commonly something that should be called "camming" --- you simply point a camera at the book, and take a picture of every page.

No it is not. https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1vrvt9e/athome_s...

I mean, everything about intellectual property is kind of inherently artificial tbf.

> It is 100% the consequence of stupid laws.

More like the consequence of being unwilling to change stupid laws once the stupidity of them is discovered. Nope. Gotta double down on the stupidity instead...

I've read a few of those articles in recent months, both in English and German, and I did read any book title that was rare. The Rare Book & Special Collection Div at the Library Congress considers books published before 1801 as rare. Searching for old books on abebooks is surprisingly hard but I didn't find any for less than 10 Euro and nothing in those articles suggested they were buying up anything but cheap books.

Use a vpn

Does Anna's Archive have it now? They scrape tons of sources, Google Books and HathiTrust included.

I agree they're the best currently available, but a lot of their scans are straight garbage and need to be redone.

The blog post is about rare books. Meaning, AI companies scanning and destroying rare books.

I feel they are thinking first printing of some mega classic or hand drawn book from antiquity. I am thinking of some generic romance or thriller from no name author bought at airport... Or some generic book on say birds or animals... Stuff that they would not take if given a full box for free.

Books have been declared dead several times of the last quarter century, yet in the EU alone it's still half a million new titles every year and a 40 billion Euro market.

Good premise for a scifi novel.