AI companies are shredding rare books

A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CLEARLY fair use, and even gets me to listen to the songs more, but they are stealing all revenue for a fair use video that took a lot of time and money to make to begin with, they are profiting from work they didn't even do. This is silly to me, I'm sure there's loads of other channels and videos out there screwed over by the record industry over 15 second samples from a song... Which should 100% be fair use and not be given to the record labels.

Issue is small streamers have no legal defense.

Edit, adding the channel I am referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos

  > for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are

Books in the 17th and 18th century often didnt get bound by the publisher. They were done by independent binders for _custom_ orders. You’d see whole libraries with the owners binding/cover standards rather than per book.

Books in that time were _luxury_ goods. Most people could not afford them. One of the ways that was changed was to introduce cheap, mass produced bindings that were lower quality than the bespoke artisianal bindings done by specialist craftsmen.

You can still get custom bindings done. There exists whole niches on the internet of crafters that will take a production run book and strip its binding and make you extremely high quality and custom bindings and covers.

> I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick

At the risk of stating the obvious, any poorly made books from then wouldn’t have lasted this long and so you would never see them.

I have even less sympathy for IP stealing LLM operators

> It's ridiculous that in the 21st century, publication standards have fallen to the point where for most works a disposable format is the only type available - where no amount of money could buy a truly decent hardback copy.

This is purely a response to market demand. Publishers aren’t going to put in the extra expense of binding high quality versions of every book so it can occupy warehouse space while consumers everywhere buy the cheap paperback.

> And if the publisher keeps a book in print - but only in bestseller-grade materials, bogroll paper that furrows in any humidity and perfect binding that molts its pages a couple of dry seasons later - and if it refuses to print a durable hardback copy with signatures, good paper and decent print - something that will still be readable in several generations' time - any other publisher keen to have a crack at it should be able to, again without any compensation for the original publisher, though perhaps in this case, with matching royalties for the author.

This is all based on the idea that there is hidden demand for something, but publishers are choosing to deprive us all of it for reasons. That if we open up the laws, another company will come along and satisfy this hidden market opportunity and associated profits that publishers are declining to take.

The simpler explanation is that these high quality editions aren’t being published because the publishers have the data about demand for them. They know they won’t sell.

If the goal is preservation, laws forcing publishers to print on slightly nicer paper isn’t going to solve the problem. It needs to be a robust digital archive and it needs to exist somewhere other than in unsold warehouse inventory or some book collector’s shelf. You’re trying to solve a problem with last century’s technology.

> I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick.

Those books predate the development of wood pulp paper. It isn't the publisher's fault they can't economically print on rag paper anymore.

I'd go for the less complex version: just make copyright last for like 20 years at most.

> I've limited sympathy for the publishers.

This doesn't affect publishers.

It affects humanity as a whole by having large private parties hoard books to partly destroy them. The covers and spines can have historical value too. There's not even a reason for these companies to release their scans to the public once the copyright expires.

It prevents proper preservation by archivists and preservationists.

The post doesn't call for the sympathy for the publishers, so I'm not sure what you're responding to.

Yeah it's as if the publishers are somehow strapped for cash compared to AI companies.

No one reasonable is concerned for publishers they are concerned for the books. Assuming the allegations are correct historical artifacts are being destroyed with no trace. It doesn’t even matter if they republish it. The artifact itself and the time it has transited is the valuable thing. It is simply immoral to destroy stuff like this.

> When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print

How do you adjudicate that? And wouldn't it just lead to loopholes such as "Ghost Printings" (cf. Ghost Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_(commercial_aviat... ) where the books are technically printed in the required volume but practically unavailable to customers through one method or another. Because, the cost of wastefully printing a few books to warehouse, is less than the potential losses of the IP rights, probably.

I agree. However, AI companies have managed to make publishers and copyright owners saints by comparison.

I've never read a coherent argument for why all of these "should"s should be. I understand you want to read the books. But I don't see how that desire results in the laws needing to be changed so that you can read everything you want, even things the author or owner doesn't want you to read.

There is not a shortage of books in print. I don't understand why people get so hung up on a few of them being out of print. It is okay for someone to own something cool and not let anyone see it. The cool thing doesn't suddenly become a societal necessity because it is words written down.

Thanks for your thoughts, but how is this is anyway relevant to the issue at hand? I'm sad that this is the top comment...

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> We reprint old books after checking out copyrights

Who is we?

> then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely

Is that the best thing for archival storage? Like could things like chemical breakdown increase the humidity in the sealed bag or concentrate corrosive chemical vapors? I was under the impression the best environment was an actively climate-controlled environment.

Some source or citation or context is needed here, is this the work of a 2 person no profit or a trillion valued pre IPO company?

> And no, no AI company has ever come to us and asked to run training on all of our scanned copies

The value of most very old books for AI training is very low. You don’t really want your AI training data to start biasing toward outdated writing styles. Most of the valuable knowledge has been covered again in modern texts in more depth and detail.

There is interesting value in old texts and it’s important to have them archived. It’s less valuable for stirring into the giant pot of AI training data, though.

> And no, no AI company has ever come to us and asked to run training on all of our scanned copies

Yet

Why cut off the spines? Isn't that how you end up getting unattributed 'dead sea scrolls'?

Most likely they don't know you exist. If you contacted them first, maybe something could be arranged...

or just send the books/scans to a country that doesn't recognize US copyright

Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper.

What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled.

That would be the dominant scanning method even if copyright wasn't a thing. But then again - if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media.

The reason why OpenAI can't just go on Amazon, buy a "digital edition" of a 2018 book and use that is that it would violate the license in ten ways, and then the DMCA laws that forbid breaking DRM on top of it.

> You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal.

An 18th century book would be out of copyright so why would it be illegal to keep the original and scan it?

> Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright?

It's cheaper to scan the books if you do it destructively. Cost. That's why they're shredding irreplaceable texts. Nothing to do with copyright.

https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...

Old rare books where there are single digit copies should enjoy some sort of patrimonial protection just like museum pieces. You can own them but have the state have the option to buy it if you’re about to significantly deface it or destroy it.

Books that are shredded can’t be scanned by competitors.

The archive.org story was more nuanced than that. If I recall correctly the full story was that they used to lend digital versions of books they physically bought and scanned with DRM to enforce a sort of one to one at a time restriction.

But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently which started the debacle with the publishers.

> Publishers should be more careful what they wish for. you think they don't like people destroying their books? if you destroy a book, that increases the value of the others and the unpublished holdings (unfortunately)

Publishers don't care if rare books get shredded?

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> That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result

How are these things remotely related? If anything, Archive.org’s callous, thoughtless approach nuked the hands of legitimate archival efforts.

So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.

I see.. so the various AI companies are in the right on this?

This is such propaganda lol

They change the info (many buyers), destroy the source material, and now the lie is in the LLM.

That's it!

Modern texts become ancient texts; given enough time.

> Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25

More like destructively scanning it for $0.25, if you include the wear and tear on the machine, the salary of the guy who unjams it when it chokes, and recycling fees.

Buying up old books is legal. Digitizing and distilling them arguably is too. And also:

> paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers

Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large. There’s so many other fields that are likely to reward participants with more wealth that it’s absurd — even with all the passion for the work in tech it’s probably relatively less pure.

And whatever the excesses of copyright have been, the whole bargain has always been on more pro-social foundations and stronger intellectual foundations than “extortion” sneers. It recognizes that incentives matter and work that’s valuable should be rewarded and incentivized.

A culture that takes a Robin Hood approach to low marginal cost billing points but fawns over the hypercapitalized distribution King Johns isn’t creating a freer or richer society or fighting the real cartel center, it’s indulging resentment and caricature.

Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning.

That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.

Well it's close to the author's intention for Fahrenheit 451, but just not what everyone wants it to mean.

Yeah, I was thinking along these lines...

Let's say one of the books to be digitized and destroyed is the sole remaining copy of a book from 1850, which is now considered public domain.

On one hand, hoarding such a book, stealing its content from the public domain, locking its content behind a for-profit machine, and destroying the only remaining copy is clearly wrong. It's equivalent to stealing a public resource, just like mining minerals or oil on public lands without a permit or mineral rights. Pure extraction.

On the other hand, taking care to digitize the copy and making it available for free in perpetuity, as well as being required through regulation to provide access to that content through, let's say a public utility LLM/AI available for free through libraries and online... and perhaps after fair due diligence being required to preserve physical copies in a public archive of rare books of which there are no known remaining physical copies...

That seems much more reasonable to me at least. I can imagine there are many who would not see it that way though. Do we see it happening or gaining regulatory, moral and/or public support?

There is zero reason to shred 18th century books. Any such books are out of copyright.

This works only if the digital copy is made publically available. I actually agree with destructively scanning a copy of a work that is in single digits as long as that excellent digital scan is made available.

> historically relevant medieval manuscripts,

These are increasingly available online, btw. Historical research is accelerated when historians have direct access to scans of relevant source material. Not destructively scanned, of course.

> Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable only for its content, not for the physical medium it's printed on.

Well, there are special collectors editions with the signature of the author and gold pages or whatnot. But the AI companies are probably not using those.

"To preserve them digitally"

For whom? is the relevant question

Is slightly modifying some weights in a markov chain somewhere really preserving it's contents?

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No, it isn't. Nothing about training a model requires this. You're thinking of copyright, which does treat information this way.

Yes part of the legal defense used to good effect is that they are copying one for one (not really making a copy but rather converting it). I agree with many in this thread that copyright reform is the best solution here. Shorter copyrights. Lose copyright if you stop using it (printing it), more clear digitization and preservation guidelines.

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There's a bunch of details regarding LLMs and copyright, but I don't see how

> They should be forced to publicly release the books as an Ebook.

would be reasonable in any way? The books aren't theirs to release publicly. If I brought a copy of any given movie on DVD, ripped it and used it to train my own "LLM" located at /dev/null, should I then be allowed (or even forced) to release the movie publicly for anyone to watch for free?

The 404media article mentions notably https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi... which says:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

Rare or not, destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act. I don't know man, it's not so long ago we used to view nazi book burnings as an archetype of evil. Today companies are offering book-burning-as-a-service and it hardly causes a stir.

Bearded German man was right.

This is a bizarre comparison.

Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way.

What similarities do you see here?

Libraries are not archives, and weeding does not mean destruction.

This is really dishonest framing, unless you really, honestly can't tell a difference between pulping a mass market paperback romance novel that there's 3 million of in circulation, and shredding an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.

Yeah - it does feel a bit overly dramatic, books mentioned from a potentially related article are from like 2018 (https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...). Let's not pump the drama more than we need to, Sam Altman made another mention of the singularity over the weekend so enough of that going around.

The gigantic loss is that they are destroying the original copy.

They aren’t verbatim uploading the text 1:1. They are creating vector embeddings and training documents from it, changing whatever they want since it’s in private and protected by NDA, and destroying the original source of information so that nobody knows what was originally recorded.

But is the information really scanned and preserved for direct access? Or is it just trained into an LLM so that we can only get fuzzy answers about the information?

Honestly, I think its just the fastest way to scan them (there are slower non destructive methods available too!)

Also, they can then just recycle/dispose of the paper and don't have to worry about reselling/donating the books themselves. I suspect this is all about speed of data ingestion and anything else is a side effect they don't care about.

I agree, this is bad.

They’re privately putting info into their LLMs, changing whatever they want, sorry, “sanitizing” then destroying the original.

Pearl clutching nonsense

They aren’t “digitizing them” as if they are making them available online.

They are creating embedding vectors and training documents - changing whatever they want - and destroying the original copy so nobody knows what was actually said.

It is just like book burning.

> being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches

You make it sound like they are running a second Project Gutenberg. They most definitely are not making these available for electronic searches. At least not searches the public can participate in.

And knowledge from these books can be "imprinted" into a model to be used by much more people or even survive this planet once sent into space in a probe.

> are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches

What guarantee do we have that the book contents will be served unfiltered and unaltered?

Are they being digitised? That word implies that the book would have a digital representation of the original, which is not what an LLM is. Can they be found in electronic searches? I mean I kinda get what you mean, the knowledge was potentially forgotten and now it might not be, but also the authors who created that knowledge get no credit, no reward.

Support your local shadow library: https://annas-archive.pk/donate

Yes, this is very disturbing to me. I recently discovered how great old, out of circulation/print can be. Now old abandoned libraries are like a treasure trove to me. If these books are not digitaly preserved, that sounds very sad to me.

This is quite a reasonable take.

They are digitized for private training and not for public use. Not a single human is reading these.

It's amazing what reading a word in that book like sousveillance can do.

I looked it up.

surveillance, sousveillance - sure, why not? Seems harmless.

But it's as if the more people know the word sousveillance, the word and even the act of surveillance actually loses a little bit of power (its embedding changes, if you will!)

All our fears about the end state of surveillance can now be countered by an end state of sousveillance.

Before I had sousveillance to think of, I could only think of surveillance (when thinking of veillances) - and it was more of a threat then than it is now.

The world is made of language, or as Terence McKenna said made out of words which sounds obviously false at first. But go looking for the inside of an atom and tell me what you find, and think about where the medium of reality actually implements itself.

Well, an oracle except for that part in the same book where unlimited access to the internet made all children prodigies self-motivated by their love of learning.

"Librareome Project"

It's cheaper to destructively scan.

You're right, it is arguably worse than book burning, not only are they seeking to deprive others of the books, they also want to profit off it.

> why dilute it with this kind of bullshit:

> > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control

That's only bullshit if you trust AI companies to serve the book contents without alteration.

Because there's nothing to report. Books like this are routinely thrown out. By publishers, libraries, and regular people alike.

Each individual book is rare, the purchase includes many different rare books

Take a look at most successful journalism today. It's behind a paywall. You get paid by the people who are interested and value your work.

Can Google steal it and present it in an AI overview? Well kinda. Today Google is doing a trick - they're saying "You can refuse to consent to being fed into the slop machine, but if you do we won't crawl you for Google so you'll get no search traffic. But you're not going to get search traffic anyway! So you might as well opt out of being fed into the slop machine. And companies are starting to do that [1]

It's really interesting, because essentially what it means is Google is turning into a walled garden, but there's nothing growing inside it so they have to continually import new plants to live in their walled garden and they're going to have to pay to do that. So soon Google will be paying news sites for the right to plumb their feed into the slop machine.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/google-search-publishers-...

It’s even noted they’re looking for text pre 2022 as afterward, it’s tainted by their own shit, they don’t believe in the crap they’re making.

Almost certainly not, because they need that data for model-building and rebuilding., and the storage cost is completely trivial.

The irony in asking for a source here. I guess the idea is that eventually you won't get to ask for a source because they'll all have been destroyed.

And the only real source for anything will be an LLM response.

This is the correct take.

Copyright has done more than anything else to prevent preservation and dissemination of knowledge. And it's forcing Anthropic's hand now. Although they could take more effort to preserve the books.

Where I live there's a large library-associated biannual book sale where books are (effectively) reverse auctioned over a period of a few weeks. At the end, anything (with a few exceptions, like the Collector's Corner) that isn't sold is disposed of, with a large 18-wheel truck sized dumpster filled with items to be sent for pulping and recycling. The price at the end is $1 for a grocery bag full of books, so things that don't sell truly are perceived as worthless.

https://booksale.org/

Books are information delivery vehicles. We mostly shouldn't care about them any more than we care about a particular set of bits on a disk.

Publishers also pulp large numbers of books themselves. This is a consequence of the Supreme Court's Thor Power Tools ruling, which clarified tax rules in the US so that keeping large inventories of unsold books was less economical.

That's not an accurate characterization of the ruling

What else they can do based on this?

The idea here is that the frontier labs are no longer willing to risk using the likes of Anna’s Archive, because they have already been held legally liable for that in the past.

Yes, actually you can. The fetish of physical book worship is a fossil of an age when information storage and retrieval was much harder.

You know, I'm pretty sure post-slurping the text is still there...

Burn them at the stake! Grab your pitchforks!

I love it. Literally burning down civilization to generate losses from slop. This reminds me of the Simpsons Halloween episode where Homer gets a taste for his own flesh and eats himself to death.

Maybe the Library of Alexandria didn't burn, it was digested.

The market has solved the what do with excess knowledge problem.

> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing.

It is the copyright thing.

Despite what people say about scanning, the fact is, non-destructive scanning machines have been built and perfected long time ago. This was preferred in the past, back before some major kerfuffle with the publishers during COVID, but that incidentally happened to be before LLMs became a thing, so AI companies never had that option available.

They're destroyed for 3 reasons:

It is the cheapest way to get them scanned.

It is the fastest way to get them scanned.

It doesn't need to be safely archived for another century until it is resold to someone that has not yet been born.

> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing.

The main reason is the machines they use to scan books at scale destroy the books in the process.

> For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.

What makes you think they will? What would be the incentives for these companies to do so?

That's only true if you think digital storage has more longevity than paper. It doesn't.

So if the Mona Lisa is part of a model we can burn it?