أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

AI Companies Burning Books; Really?

Throughout history, many books and libraries have been destroyed on purpose to hide knowledge, change how people think, or erase groups of people. The true history of book burning, or biblioclasm, is a long-standing tool of political and religious censorship used by rulers like Emperor Qin Shi Huang in ancient China, conquerors during the siege of Baghdad, and Nazi-led students in 1933 Germany to destroy ideas and control populations.

Ancient and Medieval Destruction

Emperor Qin Shi Huang (213 BCE): Ordered the burning of philosophy and history books in ancient China to stop comparisons to past rulers and consolidate absolute power.

The Library of Alexandria: Suffered multiple fires and destructions during ancient military sieges and political upheavals, resulting in massive losses of classical knowledge.

The Siege of Baghdad (1258): When the Mongols sacked the city, so many books from the House of Wisdom were thrown into the Tigris river that the water allegedly ran black with ink.

Modern Eras and Nazi Germany

May 10, 1933: Pro-Nazi university students organized massive bonfires in Berlin and 34 other German towns, incinerating tens of thousands of volumes deemed "un-German".

Targets: Books by Jewish authors, political leftists, pacifists, and scientists like Albert Einstein were burned under the watchful eye of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Heinrich Heine’s Warning: A century prior, the German-Jewish poet predicted this path, writing that where books are burned, humans will eventually be burned as well.

The Most Disturbing News: Deliberate Destruction of Books

The rare book destruction is most dangerous because we don't know of they're going to alter the text. Without any surviving copies, whole books can be fabricated and told that they are real.

AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. 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.

"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Yes, it is true. AI companies are buying physical, pre-2022 books in massive bulk, slicing off their spines for industrial high-speed scanning, and then shredding or pulping the remnants. While it sounds like a dystopian myth, this practice has been uncovered through court filings and investigations into the tech industry's frantic search for "clean" data.

Why Are AI Companies Doing This?

Avoiding "AI Slop": The modern internet is heavily saturated with AI-generated text. If an AI model is trained on text written by another AI, it triggers a glitch known as "model collapse", where the system progressively degrades and becomes prone to severe errors. Books printed before 2022 serve as a pristine, unpolluted reservoir of purely human-authored, professionally edited knowledge.

The Legal Loophole: Lawsuits against companies like Anthropic revealed that downloading pirated digital book libraries can cost companies billions in copyright settlements. However, U.S. legal proceedings established a loophole: if an AI firm legally purchases a physical copy of a book, digitizes it internally, and destroys the physical version without redistributing it, it can be argued as "transformative" fair use.

How the Process Works?

Bulk Buying Through Brokers: Specialized data book-brokers, such as ISBNdb (404media.co), help AI companies anonymously order anywhere from 1,000 to one million physical books at a time.

Targeting Rare and Foreign Titles: Antiquarian and secondhand book dealers across Europe and the U.S. have reported sudden, massive orders for low-circulation, obscure academic, history, and foreign-language titles.

Destructive Scanning: Because meticulous page-turning is too slow, automated facilities use hydraulic cutting machines to cleanly slice the spines entirely off the books. The loose pages are fed through high-speed scanners at lightning velocity.

The Pulping Phase: Once the text is ingested into the database, the loose sheets are sent directly to recycling and pulping companies.

"The Optics Problem"

Internal documents unsealed in lawsuits show that tech giants are highly aware of how bad this looks. One company initiative, Anthropic's "Project Panama", explicitly noted a desire to keep the operation quiet, stating that headlines like "AI company destroys two million books" would trigger massive public backlash. Because some of the books being bought in bulk are out-of-print or low-circulation editions, rare-book dealers have expressed deep worry that rare pieces of human history are being permanently erased for digital training data.

To shield humanity’s literal and cultural treasure from industrial destruction by tech companies, book lovers must shift from passive reading to active, communal stewardship. When a corporate entity view physical books as disposable material to be bought, spine-cut, and shredded, the counter-strategy must be physical decentralization, independent gatekeeping, and decentralized archives.

1. Disrupt the Broker Supply Chain

AI companies rely on digital data brokers and online second-hand aggregators to secretly buy millions of pre-2022 books.

Book lovers can actively disrupt this pipeline:

Vet Large Buyers: Local bookstores and antique dealers should flag anomalous, automated orders—especially those buying randomly by ISBN lists or mass non-fiction categories.

Support Local Sellers: Buy directly from independent, physical bookshops. Keeping local shops financially stable ensures they do not have to sell their stagnant backroom inventory to bulk corporate liquidators.

Boycott Aggregator Scrapers: Avoid offloading valuable personal collections to faceless online trade-in platforms that might act as fronts for scanning operations.

2. Implement Community Archiving

The safest place for a rare book is spread across a decentralized network of human homes, not a centralized warehouse.

Build Private Lending Libraries: Pool collections with trusted friends, creating neighborhood networks where books are read, borrowed, and tracked by real humans.

Adopt Obscure Titles: Take an active interest in low-circulation books, localized histories, regional poetry, and out-of-print academic texts. These niche genres are highly targeted by AI firms looking for un-digitized data.

Refuse "Digital-Only" Transitions: Push back against local public and university libraries attempting to clear out physical shelves under the guise of "digitization efforts."

3. Support Independent Digital Repositories

Not all scanning is destructive. Book lovers should champion community-driven, respectful digital preservation:

Contribute to Open Repositories: Support non-profit platforms like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, which digitize texts to preserve the original physical copy and make it universally accessible to human eyes.

Advocate for Legal Protections: Support author groups, like the Authors Guild, and legal frameworks pushing back against loopholes that label the physical destruction and algorithmic exploitation of books as "fair use".

4. Establish and Support Libraries

A. Adopt Professional Home Conservation

If you own rare or pre-2022 editions, your home library is a fortress for authentic human thought. Protect them from physical decay so they never end up in a recycling bin:

Stabilize the Environment: Store your volumes in a cool, dry area, maintaining temperatures between 15°C and 21°C and relative humidity between 40% and 50% to prevent mold or brittle pages.

Block Direct Sunlight: Keep bookcases away from windows, as ultraviolet light breaks down paper fibers and fades ink.

Shelf Safely: Keep small and medium books stored vertically so they support each other, and lay heavy, oversized atlases horizontally.

Avoid Raw Wood contact: Use metal shelves with a baked enamel finish, or seal wooden shelves to keep damaging wood acids from seeping into the paper.

B. Public & Community Libraries:

The strategic expansion and fortification of public, private, and community libraries serve as the most effective structural shield against this trend. Libraries completely disrupt the predatory acquisition models used by tech corporations by transforming books from temporary private commodities into permanently protected public goods.Libraries actively combat the destructive scanning pipeline through several key mechanisms:-

1. Removing Books from the Commercial Market

Permanent Public Trust: When a book enters a library's permanent collection, it is legally and physically removed from the open commercial market where AI brokers operate.

Blocking Bulk Liquidation: AI companies thrive on buying massive, cheap inventory from liquidators. Libraries absorb this excess inventory through donations and sales, keeping the books in circulation among humans instead of being sold to tech scrapers.

2. Legal Protections Against Exploitation

Strict "First Sale" Defense: Libraries operate under established legal frameworks that protect the right to lend physical items. They have a vested interest in fighting legal loopholes that allow companies to buy books just to destroy them.

Controlled Digital Lending (CDL): Unlike AI companies that scan books to strip their data, libraries use CDL to securely lend digital copies on a strict one-to-one (owned-to-loaned) basis, which legally keeps the original physical book safely preserved in a vault.

3. Guardians of "Low-Circulation" and Rare Titles

Preserving Local History: AI data brokers actively target niche academic texts and regional histories because they are free of "AI slop." Libraries are the primary institutions that value and protect these low-circulation books.

Physical Security: Rare book rooms and specialized archives keep texts under strict environmental controls and constant human surveillance, making it impossible for corporate buyers to acquire and destroy them.

4. Decentralizing the Human Archive

A Fortress in Every Town: If humanity’s pre-2022 knowledge is stored in a few massive warehouses, it is highly vulnerable to corporate buyouts. Spreading books across tens of thousands of independent local libraries creates a decentralized network that no tech company can fully buy out or monopolize.

Fostering a Culture of Material Stewardship: Libraries act as civic hubs that educate communities on the value of physical print, ensuring that future generations continue to demand, protect, and read physical books.

Books are true human assets and a rich legacy because they store our wisdom, share our stories across time, and guide new generations. The books shape history by spreading ideas and building culture. They keep facts and skills safe so we do not forget them. Reading helps people think better and solve hard problems. Unlike money or tools, a good idea in a book lasts forever. Writers who are gone can still speak to us through their pages. They show who we were and what we dreamed.

The books help parents and teachers to shares values to the young-the next generation, the humanity's future; thus bridging future from the past and preserving humans legacy. The rare book destruction is most dangerous because we don't know of they're going to alter the text. Without any surviving copies, whole books can be fabricated and told that they are real. Preserving our common heritage is ours responsibility.