“Book Spotlight” is almost always dedicated to a recommendation of a single book, but not this month. This month we’re telling you about one of the latest atrocities of AI, the destruction of rare and old books. AI companies are currently buying huge amounts of rare books, slicing the spines off, scanning them to train AI bots, then destroying them. There’s several stated reasons-
- They’re free of AI slop– Not even AI trusts AI! Books produced before the AI era (roughly 2002) can’t have the errors and hallucinations of a book produced by an AI model, and are therefore more trustworthy.
- Destruction avoids copyright– Anthropic got hit with a lawsuit for copyright infringement when it scanned thousands of books to train its AI. While it was ruled illegal to just copy the books, a judge determined that destroying them counted as “transformative use” and skirted the copyright laws.
- It’s cheaper– It’s possible to scan a book page by page, but it’s much cheaper to run it through a machine.
You may have already heard about this story, but if you didn’t catch the media wave in July/August you can be forgiven for not knowing anything about it now, because it’s been radio silence on the issue since. We’re sorry to do it, but as book lovers we feel an obligation to share these links with you…
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop, Emanuel Maiberg on 404 Media, Jul 2026
Why is Anthropic destroying books? The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data, Kathryn James in The Guardian, Aug 2026
Why tech companies are buying up tons of rare old books to train their AI models, Ryan, Summers, and Yu on All Things Considered, Aug 2026
Why AI companies are pulping millions of old, rare books, Frank Chung in KidsNews, Aug 2026
AI companies accused of hoarding and destroying millions of books, Megan Cerullo on CBS News, Aug 2026
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility, Emanuel Maiberg on 404 Media, Aug 2026
AI Companies Are Buying—And Destroying—Antique Books. Here’s Why., Mary Whitfill Roeloffs in Forbes, Aug 2026
AI Book Burning? Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books to Feed Chatbots, Jason Nelson on Yahoo Finance, Jul 2026
The BOOK SPOTLIGHT at Wallace Books- We always link our Book Spotlight to Powells.com so you can order the book if you’re interested, but it’s also available Sellwood’s Wallace Books, in the “Tom Dwyer Book Spotlight” display. Check it out!
