I got overly excited a couple of weeks ago and went on a book order frenzy on Vinted. This week I received all my (not really) new seven books! One of them is so pretty I just want to keep it under my pillow when I sleep 😍

I just wanted to share this because it made me so happy. Is there anything that made you happy this week? Can be book related or not.

First off, incredible quest. It’s a dream come true for someone who’s been reading cli-fi and solarpunk for years 😎

Next, I had a couple of suggestions, one I’ve read and one I haven’t. Adding books like these to the quest could help support some lesser known authors in the space: — 🔗Bright Green Futures, edited by Susan Kaye Quinn. It’s an anthology but the editor has a 🔗solarpunk podcast and is very outspoken online! — 🔗Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future edited by Grist (yep, the climate journalism outlet). This isn’t strictly solarpunk, but I want to suggest it because there’s a wide range of authors represented, many from island nations, and I think it’s important to take as global of a lens as possible with climate change.

EDIT: added links

As the title says, AI companies are apparently buying Antique books and feeding the books to AI models. According to this Article called "AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale" (Article be found here) Says that "many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use."

In the article they also mention a book seller stating "One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller told 404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

In this Article called "Rare book dealers fear tech firms are destroying obscure editions to train AI models" (Article can be found here) states that "Secondhand booksellers across Europe, including in the Netherlands, are raising concerns over AI companies buying large numbers of obscure and often rare books. The alleged intent behind such shopping is to scan and destroy them for AI training."

And that

"in June 2025 during a U.S. copyright lawsuit against Anthropic. Although the company behind chatbot Claude settled the case, booksellers say the proceedings established a troubling precedent: a U.S. court found that destroying purchased books for scanning purposes falls under fair use, provided the company legally owns the physical copies.

That ruling is seen as a key reason AI firms are seeking older European books, which booksellers suspect are being shipped to the United States in large quantities.

The demand reportedly reflects a broad search for new training material as developers of AI systems exhaust much of the language already available online. Companies are increasingly seeking texts that are older, less digitized, and harder to find on the internet"

Clearly, this is awful for multiple reasons. The stealing of Human work being fed to Gen AI, the apparent destruction of rare antique books, which I know we have many books and not all of them can last and be preserved and collected forever, but to have these books be destroyed by gen AI companies instead of people seeing if they want to attempt to preserve these books is terrible.

Not me finding out just now while reading this that the band Amon Amarth is literally named after Mount Doom -___-

Check off the things you have and haven't done and give us your total score!

1. Hugged a book
2. Lied about what you're reading (or hid a book)
3. DNFed a book
4. Dog-eared a book
5. Complained about the movie/TV adaptation
6. Pulled out your book at a party
7. Attended a book club meeting
8. Dropped a book on your face while reading
9. Smelled a book
10. Stared into space after finishing a book
11. Gotten a book-related tattoo
12. Lost a book you borrowed (from a friend or library)
13. Posted about your reading on (non PB) social media
14. Picked up a book someone else abandoned somewhere
15. Skipped an event or appointment to read
16. Read when you expressly were not supposed to be reading
17. Gone into a bookstore "just to browse" and came out with books
18. Re-read a whole book just because you forgot what happened so that you can go into the sequel fresh
19. Gotten an ARC through NetGalley
20. Got second-hand embarrassment by a character's actions