AI companies are shredding rare books

Hedgie @HedgieMarkets 13h 🦔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." My Take 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. Hedgie🤗 Jul 27, 2026 · 12:18 AM UTC 1,265 10,243 18,532 936,841 Sort replies: Relevant Recent Liked axcilla @axcilla 13h Replying to @HedgieMarkets If you destroy history you can use AI to rewrite it 30 151 1,620 26,779 Hedgie @HedgieMarkets 1m 🦔Once the physical original is gone, there's nothing left to check the digital copy against. That's what makes destroying primary sources different from scraping a website. 1 74 PGT @PG_Ting 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets The physical copies are artifacts that need to be preserved, not destroyed. We are becoming increasingly stupid, careless and thoughtless, everywhere you look. 17 90 1,015 13,412 Hedgie @HedgieMarkets 51s 🦔I agree. A scan drops what the physical book carries, the marginalia, the printing, the binding. Hard to justify pulping that to train a chatbot. 15 Own Your Compute @MoonlitMaven 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Burning of the library of Alexandria 2.0 15 77 1,034 18,927 Hedgie @HedgieMarkets 1m 🦔This version is deliberate and for profit. A company runs the numbers, sees money in shredding old books, and sets up a service to do it at scale. 33 Colleen ☧ @_Momologues_ 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets The dystopian stories are coming true. 10 74 535 11,757 Hedgie @HedgieMarkets 4s 🦔Nobody even forced this one. A company looked at destroying the last copies of old books and decided there was money in it. Tarzan Jesus @tarzan_jesus_ 5m Replying to @HedgieMarkets There's no reason to shed the books after. That's fucking evil. Share the books with the world digitally sure, but then preserve those books so future generations can read them after all our technology fails in a solar flare 🌞 1 153 Bruce Davis @bjdavis0001 1h Replying to @HedgieMarkets It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control 3,282 Andrew J Horton @aHouse0fPrayer 1h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Father, Make it stop. "And I will. I will stop it. I AM THE LORD." 122 Bob Easton - N4REE @TheOneBobEaston 4h Replying to @HedgieMarkets READ: "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/it… 1 208 loco4liberty @loco4liberty 2h Replying to @HedgieMarkets And they can change a few words on the “new” digital copy and no one notices. 307 Greg @GregHar98953592 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Shades of Fahrenheit 451. 1 95 Susan Hogan @mybluedog57 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets @naomirwolf It’s like a cashless society-a bookless society. Become your own preservationist. 130 Krishna Pera @krishpera 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Under intellectual property law, the raw content of a public domain book is a “public goods” and cannot be legally licensed or monopolised. While AI companies can restrict access to their specific digital files, they have no legal ground to prevent the public from copying, extracting, or replicating the underlying text. For high-demand titles and widely accessed ISBNs, decentralized public replication will inevitably bypass these corporate paywalls very soon. I am sure AI companies know this.. 2 2 156 kaushik raj @shiiit_code 3h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Knowledge is getting transferered from one source to another , no doubt it’s wrong but the big player have holding on everything. 2,194 Flat Earth Machine Project @Flatearthmachi 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets A new form of burning books and we know what happens once the books are burn ... history has it that civilizations fall... 1 1,603 Parody Damian @DamianRazgriz 40m Replying to @HedgieMarkets 1,358 Where Are We? @EyesMalloy 8h Replying to @HedgieMarkets “The Great Reset” is the really The Great Forgetting. How do billionaires keep all future generations in bondage? They destroy history! If you don’t know history, you’ll be denied the best of it and condemned to repeat the worst of it. 1 6 739 Six String @Martin00016GT 2h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Glenn’s right again. Buy hard copies before they vanish, he said. @glennbeck 2,193 Insolent_Villager 🇺🇲🥩⚛️💻 @Insolent_Villag 6h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Half of everything about this timeline is crazy depressing and the other half is super cool future stuff. It's a hell of a rollercoaster. 2 533 AESCLEPEUS ⚕ @HERCULES_117 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets @lafemme_nikkita Imagine they get their hands on some old scrolls, copy and burn them to keep them 1-to-1. Are we sure this is happening with artifact tier books? 4 1,826 Lee Sinnott @lee26806 7h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Doing this allows you to rewrite history and unless you have an original, there is no way of telling. 1984 anyone? 3 1,077 Robert M Van Praag @RobertMVanPraag 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets 🤬 423 Basement Dweller @thinkingfejlgk 4h Replying to @HedgieMarkets So basically a judge ordered that you must shred any book that you scan? The killer of Iryna walking free, Shiloh busted for filming a child molester—is there any atrocity judges won’t commit? 12 2,511 Good Items For Sale, Car parts and Antiques @DeanPres2024 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Imagine the human scum that work for, promote and make money off of such schemes? 2 511 The Caretaker @ThothScribe 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets This is why I’ve been saying we all need to start physical rare and out of print book collections. 2 642 James Maki @stillright2023 59m Replying to @HedgieMarkets This is how they destroy our written history. via shredder. 20 Mehmet İstanbullu @MehmetDerSaadet 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Should be criminalized. If AI is not good enough to scan a book without preserving its physical integrity, what good is it> 1 161 LoxLeeFox @Lox337Fox 10h Replying to @HedgieMarkets Whats even more bleak is that this post was written by AI too 3 520 CADark @ca95222 5h Replying to @HedgieMarkets So, even though they're a pain to store in my small house, I shall be hanging on to my 1920s British encyclopedias, Books of Knowledge volumes 1 to 8, old royal Jubilee tomes and a number more. 5 1,886 🏛 Kassandra Troy ☦ @KassieTroy 2h Replying to @HedgieMarkets I don't suppose they can lay their hands on the most precious books, which are in museums and churches. 1 1 4 280 James Ryan Taylor @Jam3sRyanTaylor 7h Replying to @HedgieMarkets So we should all stop using AI right or at least @AnthropicAI @claudeai right @HedgieMarkets . So did they not erase enough history with killing all the old people with covid now they gotta get rid of all the books too 5 1,207 Fluffy Seals @SealsFluffy 7h Replying to @HedgieMark