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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[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 points 16 hours ago

If they were archiving digital versions so they could be read by thousands in the future, this would be a totally different conversation.

They don't even need to be as selfless as the internet archive - just follow Googles lead and allow people to search and view selections the archive, with automatic opening of the archive when you are confident copyright is expired. Even a closed archive owned by a third party with a dead mans switch to open it in the future when the business model is done would be something.