AI companies are buying up rare and out-of-print books by the truckload, cutting off the bindings, scanning every page, and then pulping what’s left. Some of these books have almost no surviving copies anywhere else.
If you’ve ever sold an old book, inherited a box of them, or just like the idea that a rare title survives somewhere, this should bother you. Once one of these books gets fed into the machine, it’s gone. There’s no digital backup sitting in a library. There’s no second copy waiting in someone’s attic. It’s simply destroyed.
How this is actually happening
According to reporting from 404 Media and others, the process is called destructive scanning. High-speed machines slice the spine off a book, feed the loose pages through a scanner, and then the paper gets thrown out or pulped. Companies want books published before 2022, since those are less likely to contain AI-generated text that could pollute the data they’re collecting.
Booksellers in the US, Canada, and Europe say they’re getting bulk orders that don’t make sense for normal customers. One seller told reporters he used to sell about 20 books a week. Since April, he’s regularly selling hundreds. The orders are random and tied to ISBNs, not to which books are rare or hard to find.
Some of this is happening under strict secrecy. A service called ISBNdb reportedly offers AI companies non-disclosure agreements so their identities never get attached to the purchases. Its own website even acknowledges the problem, saying a headline like “AI company destroys two million books” doesn’t exactly earn public sympathy.
A federal judge has already ruled that scanning purchased books and destroying the originals afterward counts as fair use under copyright law. That ruling is part of why this practice has been able to scale up so quickly. Reports also point to Anthropic having run a large-scale version of this earlier, under an internal project reportedly called Project Panama.
What this means if you’ve got old books lying around
Nobody checks whether a book is one of the last copies on Earth before it goes through the scanner. If you or a relative has a box of old or unusual books gathering dust, it might be worth getting them appraised or checked out by a local library or rare book dealer before selling them off cheap. A book that looks worthless to you could be one of the only copies left, and once it’s sold into this pipeline, there’s no getting it back.
