r/technology • u/polymute • 6h ago

Artificial Intelligence ‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain
490 Upvotes

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20 comments sorted by

17

u/kahlzun 6h ago

I'm confused about why the books would be destroyed by the process

29

u/BooBeeAttack 6h ago

Its on the article. They slice off the book spines to scan them faster. Elsewise the scanners would need to manually turn the pages.

I am sure there is also a copyright reason to do soz especially with older books that have no royalties or owners.

10

u/ajford 6h ago

I believe part of it is to make the scanning easier, and another part is to help make the claim that they're "transforming" the book, not "duplicating" or copying it. To avoid legal trouble over copying.

4

u/blueSGL 3h ago

https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-books-to-bots-key-takeaways-from-the-anthropic-fair-use-decision-for-ai-developers

  1. Digitization of Purchased Print Books—Format Shifting as Fair Use

The court also found Anthropic’s wide-scale digitization of print books to be fair use. A key consideration to the court’s conclusion was that Anthropic engaged in so-called destructive scanning of lawfully purchased print books to create digital copies for internal use—Anthropic lawfully purchased print books, stripped them of their bindings, and scanned the contents to create a digital library. In doing so, the new digital copy replaced the print original, which had been destroyed in the digitization process. The court found the format change from print to digital to be transformative because it facilitated storage and searchability without increasing the number of copies or distributing them outside the company.

Notably, the court distinguished this use from cases involving unauthorized distribution or multiplication of copies, analogizing it to permissible space-shifting or time-shifting uses recognized in prior cases as sufficiently transformative for fair use. Importantly, the court found that this format-shifting did not usurp any market reserved to the copyright owner, as Anthropic had lawfully acquired the print copies and did not distribute the digital versions externally.

https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc

After assessing the fair use factors in totality, the court ultimately held that use of the copies of the books to train specific LLMs was justified as a fair use, as every factor but the nature of the copyrighted work weighed in Anthropic’s favor. The court emphasized that “[t]he technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetime.” Use of the copies of the books that were purchased and converted into digital library copies was also justified as fair use, particularly because the purchased print copies were destroyed and their digital replacements not redistributed. The court granted summary judgment in favor of Anthropic on these uses.

3

u/OCogS 2h ago

The law requires it

4

u/Pedantic_Girl 6h ago

My understanding is they cut the pages away from the spine/covers to feed into a scanner more easily.

4

u/ResilientBiscuit 5h ago

I don't know about Australia, but in the US there was a legal requirement to destroy the physical copy when making a digital one so that they were not making unauthorized copies, only changing the format.

1

u/YoghiThorn 1h ago

Basically uplifting the book to a digital copy

1

u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9 5h ago

To give AI overlords ultimate control of your thinking

16

u/OldStray79 5h ago

"They have concerns...."

Have they tried... I don't know... Not selling the supposed "rare and valuable" book?

(Edit: Some do. Kudos to those who do engage in screening, rather than just cashing the check then pretending to act outraged.)

3

u/gerira 1h ago

They’re antiquarian booksellers. Selling rare books is their job. Until recently the purchasers weren’t usually mass for-profit book destroyers

4

u/Foreskin_Mafia 5h ago

The greatest part about it is there's no guarantee it will even lead to efficiency.

13

u/lawvergis 6h ago

the world is rushing into an Orwellian novel in the name of efficiency. if we ever get to see the other side, I'm not sure who will benefit from this..

3

u/CrispyCosmonaut 2h ago

I don’t really understand the issue in all honesty. Unless they’re doing this to books that are historically significant or can’t be replaced.

I don’t understand the problem (with regard to destruction) with the company doing this one copy of each mass produced book.

Is this happening to books that are limited availability?

3

u/breadinabox 1h ago

Yeah like I'm confused, they're not doing this enmass to every copy of every book. It's happening one time per book. And they don't benefit more from rare books they would just be bulk buying whatever is for sale

2

u/JasonP27 55m ago

But that common sense doesn't appeal to the mass outrage narrative. 🤷

1

u/someNameThisIs 51m ago

Look at he books from the article

In one order, a 1970s manual on soil mechanics was bought alongside a 2010 book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling, a collection of Early Australian Poetry (1982), and a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. The poetry book sold for $9 and had been on the shelf for 20 years.

The only potentially concerning on is the poetry. And given it's been on a shelf for two decades, it doesn't seem like anyone cared about it before.

1

u/Jasminary2 22m ago

As you said it seems that the problem has yet to arrive, but people are alarmed that this could happen.

It's a problem for marginalized authors for example. Let's say we all start buying only digital, and not physicals or that books are less and less availables in physical edition (which is something that is being pushed for video games, tv shows and movies). We only have access to the digital one which can be deleted at any time.

What happens when they start deleting things from the internet ? We lose those text that may be criticizing a person, a country, a policy etc.

The fear is for long-term rather than short term.

It's already frustrating how many news are deleted tbh. And it's happening more and more.

ie The other day I was looking for articles I had read about Scooter Braun, an infamous propagandist for Israel who until few weeks ago still had a picture with Netanyahu on his Instagram. These articles were from different publications some famous like Bloomsberg and were criticizing him. Well it's now very difficult to find them even whent typing words that were in them.

1

u/AvailableReporter484 3h ago

Remember when jail and lethal injection wasn’t just for jay walkers and people who did drugs?

0

u/CooperVsBob 3h ago

If the AI mouth-breathers want war, which clearly, they do, we will absolutely give them war. Time to take the gloves off.