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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[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 17 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

If they did have a copy in Anna's Archive, why the fuck would AI companies find physical copies, buy them, rip them apart, scan them, and then digitize them before destroying them?

Remember, you don't get the digital copy. It's only used to train their models.

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 hours ago

Absolutely. Every AI company has Anna's Archive in their training data already. They want to differentiate their models by having more training data than their competitors. There are way more books out there that have never been scanned than those that have.