AI Companies Are Destroying Rare & Antique Books

Artificial intelligence companies are purchasing large amounts of books, including rare and antique titles, digitally scanning their pages, then shredding the original physical copies.

If the practice continues unabated, a day will come when most human knowledge is held solely by the AI arbiters of truth. Where data center-based Gods curate the history of humanity.

“…many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment,” Futurism said Saturday.

While non-destructive methods of book scanning exist, a destructive method was selected.

“Internal Anthropic documents about its plan to scan millions of books, revealed in the copyright lawsuit, don’t make clear why the company wanted to destroy the books in the process. A deposition of Tom Harvey, who Anthropic hired to lead the project and who previously helped create Google Books, shows that one company Anthropic contracted to scan the books was Datamation, which offers both ‘high volume destructive and non-destructive book scanning’ services. In a destructive book scanning process, the spine of the book is cut so the pages can be fed into a scanning machine, which is faster and cheaper than non-destructive book scanning,” 404 Media said Tuesday.

AI companies use information from the firm ISBNdb to select titles when making massive purchases of physical books.

“ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, the numerical commercial book identifier and barcode on the back of most books. For years, ISBNdb helped book sellers, libraries, and distributors manage their inventory and find and sell books, but the generative AI boom has made it valuable to AI companies. In addition to selling access to book metadata, ISBNdb now helps AI labs source bulk printed book purchases of between 1,000 to 1 million books per order. ISBNdb’s data makes it easier for AI companies to methodically acquire, scan, and turn printed books into training data while avoiding duplication,” 404 Media said.

Specifically, the AI firms target books published before 2022, due to them being free of AI-slop. The bulk purchases also include rare and antique books, making the destruction of them extremely alarming.

“More antique books may be endangered. 404 noted how rare booksellers in the Netherlands are being inundated with bulk purchases they believe are being made by AI companies, though they can’t know for sure,” Futurism said.

Due to the “optics problem” of destroying books in the name of artificial intelligence, non-disclosure agreements are utilized to keep the practice hushed.

“Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement,” ISBNdb’s site says, according to 404 Media. “Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.”

“As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds,” Futurism said.

404 Media detailed the accounts of a number of booksellers who reported the recent phenomenon of suspected AI company book purchases:

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller, who suspects he’s sold hundreds of books to AI companies for training data, told me. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

This bookseller said his inventory is full of rare, foreign language, and low circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they’ll be even harder to obtain. 

The seller told me that, normally, on a good week, he’d sell about 20 books. Since April, he has regularly sold hundreds of books a week. While the seller didn’t have clear evidence that the purchases were being made by AI companies, the purchases made him suspect that they were. First of all, he said, the kind of books he sells are specialized and are usually bought by schools and libraries. Purchases from these organizations have been trending downward because of reduced funding, he said. Bulk purchases also usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. I have not seen any evidence that this bookseller’s recent sales were facilitated by ISBNdb or that the client was an Anthropic or another AI company.  

“It’s not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” the bookseller told me. “I’ve had library orders before, and usually they’re mostly confined to a single subject or maybe a slightly broader range of subjects. But basically, almost every library in the world has lost their budget. I know all the U.S. college libraries don’t buy much anymore. The Australian libraries don’t buy much anymore. The type of books […] there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there’s a total disregard for the price of the book. I’ve had some books that sold through this way that were […] greatly overpriced. That’s kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.” 

“Is it just me, or has there been an uptick in the number of AutoBuy orders since the tail end of last year?” one bookseller wrote on the forums for Alibris, another marketplace for selling books, in February. The AutoBuy function allows a customer to flag books they want to automatically purchase once they become available for sale on Alibris. “Any comment on what is happening? Is an AI going to read every single book? Any insight into how the selections are made? They seem to vary quite a bit in condition, format (hardcover and softcover), price and so on.”

“We have a couple of new bulk buyers that are scooping up trade books so lots of sellers are getting lots of orders,” Mike Feldman, director of client services at Alibris, responded. 

One bookseller told me that similarly large orders of books were coming through another marketplace called Biblio. Customers can provide Biblio with a spreadsheet of ISBNs they want to purchase and the company takes it from there. 

In June, a publication in the Netherlands talked to several rare booksellers who reported similar large bulk purchases they assumed were coming from AI companies.