I've limited sympathy for the publishers.

It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright.

And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick. 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.

If we have to have copyright laws, I'd like to see two changes to them.

When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print, without compensation to the original publisher, and with renegotiated royalties for the author.

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.

We reprint old books after checking out copyrights (for all books, this means pre-1930, but for some (I'd actually say most) it also means ones published up to 1964 and 1973, depending on how the rightsholders did (or didn't) do the renewals).

We use a special guillotine type cutter to cut off the binding and then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely in case the book needs rescanned for some reason. We also keep the original, uncompressed copies of the books on magnetic disks.

We also go out of our way to try to find rare books published in 1931, 1932, etc. so they are ready to go once the copyright expires.

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

> You can reprint a bestseller. 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. So it's going to accelerate.

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

IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright law than AI companies.

Scanning books you own should be legal from a copyright point of view, and not require shredding.

Second, one should think about abandoned property provisions for copyright works published more than 50 years ago and in danger of being forgotten: once challenged, either you as the owner have to prove that the work is preserved for future generations (e.g. in various libraries around the world), or you have to authorize further copies, or you give up copyright on the work.

That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.

The publishers sued AI companies for training on shadow library data, hoping to negotiate content deals for big $$$ down the line. Instead, they got analog hole'd.

Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers.

What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after the books that there's still copyright on. Second, when it comes to books, "old" doesn't mean "valuable" - plenty of libraries destroy old books because there's no demand for them, and storage costs you. This is how those scanning companies get books for so cheap.

I see mentions of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in that thread but what this really seems to be mostly like is Vernor Vinge's "shred and scan" factory in his novel "Rainbows End".

Edging a little closer to the Krazam video "rare data hunters."

Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone: digitize rare books and reverse the damage from Authors Guild v. Google [1].

Let AI companies do this. But require them to make the digital copies public. Maybe with a multi-year delay, to give the original scanner advantage to doing it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

Reminds me of Blood Meridian where The Judge meticulously sketches the rock glyphs that he comes across, and then destroys the original.

Now that I think about it, The Judge is an apt metaphor for AI : "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

Can only blame AI companies to a limited extent. This is apparently the legal way to do things because of stupid copyright laws.

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

Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding":

https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...

From what I understand, the rare books in question are not some historically relevant medieval manuscripts, but rather some relatively recent books (still under copyright) for which there are few print copies available for purchase.

I am not sure that physically destructing one copy of this type of book to preserve its contents digitally is so bad. Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable only for its content, not for the physical medium it's printed on.

And this is the beginning of the end for content creators.

Why would I spend hours creating original content if Google can extract it and present the answer directly in an AI Overview? What is the incentive to keep doing the work?

If creators stop producing high-quality original material, the information we get over the next few years will increasingly be based on recycled, low-quality garbage.

It seems a key contention of theirs is the possibility that rare books are being destroyed this way, yet the things they cite don't seem to suggest this (based on their paraphrasing), they just throw the following at the end to make it seem like it's occurring to irreplaceable books:

> 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.

Is there evidence of this? Since otherwise they could very well be describing what is only occurring to in-print or non-rare books. (This is a genuine question since their post doesn't shed any light on it.)

It's not like these books were available to everyone before. If they are destroying one physical copy that's not accessible to the public and replacing it with a scanned copy that isn't accessible to the public, that's not a huge change. Except that will probably last longer digitized. Ideally they wouldn't destroy the physical copies, but this isn't as anywhere bad as book burning in Nazi Germany.

I find going after shadow libraries to be much worse because law enforcement is trying to prevent discrimination of knowledge to the public.

The real blame here should be going onto copyright laws.

Anthropic could take more care by figuring out if the books are still affected by copyright.

But this is just a company trying its best in an unfortunate regulatory environment.

Support your local shadow library:

https://annas-archive.pk/donate

Which book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.

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

Leave it up for anyone to download and then compensate the copyright holders later.

In fact if ingesting these books for LLMs is fair use, us commoners should be able to read them for free. Maybe restrict commercial redistribution though.

From 1984: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

This is the result of our copyright law in the United States, which is extremely tilted to favor authors and publishers. The judge made exactly the right call and the companies are following the law.

The fix here is to change the law to permit training AI without destroying the original materials. But that is going to be a heavy lift.

This was known a long time ago? https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

Is there any proof of this at all beyond this random message?

That's one way to pull the ladder if regulatory capture fails...

Are the AI companies also destroying the digital scans they made?

This is the opposite of a book burning. These books which only a few would ever know the names of, let alone find, let alone read, are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches.

In a society that values science and knowledge, preservation of knowledge - and no, slurping text up into an LLM is not preservation - is more important than profits.

These companies are regressive book burners.

Also discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381838 from June 2025.

Is this true? Rare books would very often be out of copyright for a start. What the the actual ruling that says you can scan if you destroy the original? ISBNdb is a database of book information, as you would guess from the name.

May be I am old schools but rare books must remain rare and LLMs shouldnt have access to those books

Maybe we should not have forced AI companies to shred rare books so they can use them for training?

Here's the original story from 404 Media that this tweet is paraphrasing (without linking to, of course, because X disincentivizes links): https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...

The segment that talks about rare books:

> One professional bookseller who specializes in selling foreign language books on these marketplaces told me that, starting in April, he and other booksellers noticed a historic spike in sales. [...]

> 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.

I will make a robot scanner for books. I will then scan all the books in my state libraries and make a digital copy of them (without destroying them) before these things come for them.

I wish...

At the very least why not upload the scanned books to the internet archive while already at it?

This is highly disturbing news; is this standard practice? What did Google Books do before?

I have zero proof for this, but just a what if: what if Anthropic's strict anti-China stance actually means the Chinese training corpus is way more valuable than people realize?

If you consider that AI companies should pay the same for a book, as a person does, you should read about royalties.

They change the info then destroy the source. Now the lie is in the LLM.

It’s unclear whether ISBNdb will scan books without ISBN’s, which were invented in the late 1960’s. Customers appear to be ordering books to be scanned by ISBN? Here is one book seller’s experience:

> 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.

Article is paywalled, but I saved a few quotes here:

https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/post/1026

Where are the sources for that?

So the premise here is that the books are valueless enough that they're being sold by weight, but they're also rare enough that someone will one day wonder where they went, and also that the AI companies aren't also saving the text somewhere much safer than physical media in a warehouse. k.

The source for this is "I've heard it from some guy". Before we freak out, perhaps make sure it's actually happening?

The comments there are absolutely unhinged. There are some good reasons for being anti-AI, but why dilute it with this kind of bullshit:

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

absolutely diabolical

People keep bringing up these rare books but never share what they actually are. What are their names? When were they written? How many copies were in existence? Were they in libraries, or locked up in vaults? Did people have access to them prior to being scanned for AI? How many such books have actually been destroyed?

Weird to see so many of these "trust me bro" twitter stories make it to the front page and cause outrage when no one has any real information.

All those AI powers, and they cannot find a way to do it without destroying the books? Pathetic.

This is not that different from having a book burning march. The fervent neocon tech overlords and their funding circles want a monopoly; not only on truth, but on ideas and thought in general.

This is the destruction of Western civilisation.

The design of copyright has always been to restrict the dissemination of knowledge so that somebody can turn a profit. The handwaved justification is that the profit encourages the creation of new knowledge whose dissemination can be restricted, but that still doesn't erase the fundamental dynamic.

This is merely the latest incarnation. We can imagine a slightly different process on a few fronts - AI companies pay to digitize books (still for their own purposes), but are prevented from destroying the physical copies and they have to openly shared the digitized results. We would view that situation much more favorably - perhaps even as ideal, right?

Those two dynamics could be backed up by court decisions or laws iff they weren't so plainly at odds with how copyright has been and is generally implemented and interpreted. For example, imagine them having to do this through some nonprofit library whose goals was preservation and dissemination. Instead, libraries have been sidelined as things that operate at the edge of the law rather than vital public institutions, whereas shredding books in secret is fully legally condoned.

I don't buy this at all. Looking up some of the mentioned rare books, in other sources, on worldcat shows every single book available somewhere. Most of them in dozen or even hundreds of libraries.

People would have at least somewhat less of a problem with this if they also put up an archive of PDFs of all these rare books if they are out of copyright.

But that would help competitors with training data, which I assume is why they don’t do this.

Why would you need to shred a book from the 1800s when it is in the public domain? Something is fishy here.

Direct link: https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2081534588485296565

you wouldn't believe how much shredding your local library does in the name of space conservation and to address changing borrower preferences and demographics. I doubt any AI company comes close to the annual combined library turnover

> A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time.

Really? That sure wasn't a thing when one startup got sued for streaming from its wall od dvd-players, and they adhered to 1 disc = maximum 1 stream at same time.

if they do this you can foresee what else they can do

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

ironically, this tweet and account appear to be complete AI slop

What if dog pees on and shreds rare book? Like me home work? The only copy im existence!

I don't see any proof of shredding here. Most book scanners I'm aware of are from Google's scanning days, and those had cameras plus page turning.

If we use 'shredding' to mean A book is laid flat, its cover is removed, and then a paper cutter cuts through the binding to create a flat stack of sheets, which are then fed to a sheet feeder, then I could maybe imagine this is better than a page-turning scanner. But, sheet feeding old paper sucks shit, bro. It's not fun.

Upshot, I think we'd like to hear from an anonymous frontier lab employee here to see what's going on -- there are a lot of books in Anna's archive available at considerably less difficulty.

This kind of reads like a blood libel. My guess is they're buying all those books that University libraries are throwing away these days (to see other HM threads for that), kinda sad but probably aren't "rare books" in the way people are thinking

If true this is basically unforgivable. The wanton destruction of history is the stuff of the Third Reich and the Taliban. You simply cannot profess to care about knowledge, culture, or civilization while destroying the physical manifestations of the same.

I think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value.

Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content!

There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses that were never digitised. Even for beloved media, the BBC occasionally tracks down an old lost episode of Dr Who.

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