this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books (www.news.com.au)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.

ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.

“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”

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[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Lots of them are uninteresting and useless to 99.99% of people IIRC (examples I saw in a French article a few months ago was very precise history of some random villages in Spain or something similarly ultra specific)

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

When destroying books, we don't actually know what will be important in the future. That's why archivists spend so much time archiving mineutia without trying to curate. Those are different jobs and you can't curate for the future.

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Yeah I'm not saying these books are objectively uninteresting and useless and that they should be destroyed to feed some water-hungry plagiarism machine, but that is why they are not being re printed : barely anyone is buying them (despite them being rare)