WTF
AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. Then turning the originals to pulp.
The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded.
Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently. The knowledge survives only as training data inside a system no one can hold, browse, or resell.
What used to sit on a shelf for centuries now exists as weights in a model that might get deprecated next quarter.