Submission + - AI Companies Destroying Books At Scale (futurism.com)

Submitted by nightflameauto
nightflameauto writes: AI companies are purchasing books from pre-AI times. The claim is that those books are free from the defects of AI generated text, and therefore more valuable for ingestion into AI datasets. In order to accomplish this, they are tearing the books down to be scanned, then destroying them as the scans are completed. This includes rare and out-of-print books that may be some of the few copies of any given published work left in existence.

Submission + - AI Co's bulk-buying rare books, remove spine, high speed scan and shredding them (x.com) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: 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 is 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.

Submission + - Inside the dystopian world of Germany's free speech crackdown (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr Rainer Zitelmann doesn't even remember posting the meme on social media that nearly landed him in prison.

"When I opened the letter from police, I thought it was a misunderstanding," Dr Zitelmann, a German historian and author of about 30 books, told The Telegraph.

Berlin police told Dr Zitelmann he had been accused of violating a post-Second World War law that bans the display of Nazi symbols, slogans and imagery – and could now face three years in prison if found guilty.

The 69-year-old found out the offending social media post was a meme about Adolf Hitler. But it was one in which he criticised the Nazi dictator and compared his invasion of Czechoslovakia to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

"It was crystal clear the post was negative ... I was saying that Putin is so bad he is like Hitler," he explains from his study in Berlin, surrounded by hundreds of books about the rise of fascism, including his own doctoral thesis. "The comparison only works if you think Hitler was evil."

He lets out an ironic chuckle at the absurdity of it all: after decades of excoriating the Nazis in his books, a mere click of a mouse led to accusations of him being one.

Dr Zitelmann is one of thousands of Germans who have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts that fall foul of the country's political speech laws, which are unusually stringent for an EU member state.

Some of the cases are sinister and farcical in equal measure.

One German had his home raided for calling a minister a "Schwachkopf [dummy]" while another was fined €2,000 for calling Friedrich Merz a "lying Fritz" under a law that, critics claim, makes it effectively illegal to make fun of politicians.

The number of investigations under Section 86a, the Nazi symbols ban that Dr Zitelmann was investigated for, has more than doubled over the past decade according to official police statistics. Investigations into the "political insult" law also reached record levels in 2025.

The surge in cases is so vast that the UN has launched an investigation into free speech violations in Germany, a step typically reserved for dictatorships and banana republics.

Submission + - AI Companies Buying Antique Books To Train Models, Then Destroying Them (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Submission + - AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage [...] “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.” [...] ISBNdb advertises that it can keep the identity of AI companies secret. “Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement,” ISBNdb’s site says. “Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.” ISBNdb notes that AI companies may not want to be caught destroying printed books during the scanning process. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

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