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 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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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[–] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

IIRC destruction of the physical copy to prevent resale while still possessing a copy is required for book scanning to be free use, or otherwise not encounter problems with copyright law. Proceeding to share/distribute those scans, or especially trying to charge money for them, would encounter those exact same copyright barriers.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, maybe. Even then, for things in the public domain this shouldn't matter. I know that's probably not the majority of what they're scanning though.

[–] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 1 points 36 minutes ago

I would assume they aren't bothering to scan it if it's in the public domain. Much easier to just grab a copy off archive.org or any other website hosting such things, and that's assuming the entirety of the public domain isn't already in the training set.