🦔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🤗
Amazing to see how well this spaceship survived.
First-ever soft splashdown that left Starship intact & floating, allowing close-up inspection of the heat shield tiles after the wicked heat of reentry.
Onwards to catch it next time - congrats to the whole team @SpaceX !
Help us save Android now, before Google ruins it! Starting in 2027, Google will block any Android app whose developer hasn't registered and provided government ID. This affects every Android device worldwide. Learn more: https://t.co/aQDrIzBjaB @AlteredDeal#KeepAndroidOpen 🙏
@MarwinSingh@SpiderMan_Newz@phreshoutt Wow people really hating on TASM 2, I also enjoyed it. I really don't understand the collective hate that it gets.
@Hanz_Hasashi@mcumrinal Video is actually legit, the audio tho I'm not positive. The original leak wasn't in English, so this audio could be an AI translation in a Hemsworth-ish voice.
Happy birthday, MJK. Sessanta with some very *special* guests + @puscifer +@primus +@aperfectcircle - Tix this Friday at 10 am: https://t.co/bw6n8m5Y6B
A former U.S. intelligence officer has claimed that the U.S. is secretly operating a UFO retrieval program and possesses “intact craft of non-human origin.” https://t.co/jnSHEVADgl