🦔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🤗
More on Anthropic destroying millions of books:
"court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday."
https://t.co/q1dbuQfqaS
It was a finding from a legal case:
https://t.co/Vewik6zcLZ
Stop spraying perfume on your neck, especially the pulse points!
Perfume is made of alcohol, oils, and other chemical compounds that are far from gentle.
The neck skin is extremely thin and delicate, similar to armpit or private area skin. It has little protective oil, moves constantly, and is exposed to sun and friction. Spraying perfume there allows alcohol and chemicals to penetrate faster, and when combined with UV rays, this triggers long-term inflammation that leads to Poikiloderma of Civatte- a blotchy red-brown pigmentation, thinned skin, and visible broken blood vessels that nothing fully reverses.
Traditional advice suggests pulse points like the neck because they are warmer and supposedly make fragrance last longer and diffuse better. However, this is wrong for skin health. Over years, repeated exposure creates pigment changes and weakens vessels, making the neck look older and patchier than the face.
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@KUNTAKUNTY Licensed Esthi here. Definitely start wearing your moisturizer on top, azelaic acid can be drying to the skin. Over time your skin can get dehydrated causing premature lines. But def good to use everyday that’s the one I’ve been using everyday for almost 2 yrs
And this is why we need more Atlanta natives in the restaurant spaces. You saw a mural of a black woman on a wall and didn’t think to research why before you covered it
If you grew up in Atlanta/ been around a while you knew who Jovita Moore was and you know how the city responded when she died.
This coffee shop just moved into my neighborhood and painted over a mural dedicated to her for their signage and honestly it’s not sitting well w/ me