Make money doing the work you believe in
AI firms are buying up rare books in massive batches.
They feed them into scanners that cut the spines off, then shred the originals entirely.
A service called ISBNdb handles orders of up to a million books at once, while keeping who is buying them hidden.
Works printed before 2022 are most sought after, for the simple reason that they carry no text generated by AI.
A federal judge has ruled this practice counts as fair use, claiming that destroying the original ensures only one version exists at a time.
Anthropic has even brought in the former lead of Google Books partnerships, with the stated aim of acquiring all the books in the world.
When I read this, it struck me deeper than most things I have seen lately.
Booksellers have told reporters that volumes of which only two or three copies remain are being pulled straight into this system.
Works that outlasted wars, fires, and centuries of upheaval are being ground to dust, all so an algorithm can learn to draft a more persuasive sales pitch.
ISBNdb’s own site goes so far as to say headlines about AI companies destroying millions of books do not stir public feeling:
“AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy”
They present non‑disclosure agreements as a selling point, while teaching their clients to call this erasure digital preservation.
I have seen the scraping of websites, the pirating of archives, and the theft of music online; this is far worse.
A webpage can be put back up.
A popular book can be reprinted.
But you cannot remake the last surviving copy of an ancient text once it has been shredded for training data.
And because a court has said it is legal, this will only speed up.
We have reached a point where shredding irreplaceable history and hiding it behind secrecy is considered a valid business model.
That is why I pour every spare effort and resource I have into saving as many of these old books as I can.
Once they are gone, they are gone forever; and no amount of code can ever bring them back.
