Ciao Bookaholics!

How is everyone?

Im currently on an archaeology placement for uni and I recently read an Indiana Jones spoof romace book for a little bit of fun

I want to know....

Have you ever read a book related to your job/degree? And how did you find it? 🤔

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.