Untitled

reblogs were turned off but i’m seeing screenshots of the uncorrected post floating around so i’m reposting here

Al 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 Al-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 Al can learn to write a better marketing email.

ISBNdb's website literally says "Al 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 Al 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 busine model in 2026. What a timeline.

tweet by Ole Lehmann @/itsolelehmann:

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this."

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing "an editor would approve of."

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the "legal/practice/business slog."

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining "all the books in the world."

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn't produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to "store forever." the scans aren't available to the public and were never open-sourced.

Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @/iwriteok.bsky.social repost:

if elected president, i will dissolve the Department of the Navy and hand their funding, and nuclear fleet over to the Internet Archive.

They'll know what to do.

original post: Jason Scott @/textfiles.com screenshot of official Internet Archive tweet:

At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book.

We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way--one page at a time.

#digitalbooks

attached to the same post are images of people scanning books, spines intact.

How many times have you driven by an electronic road sign like one of these? This is the ADDCO portable sign. Today, you see what is on the inside, and how they are programmed to display important information. *** WARNING YOU SHOULD NEVER TAMPER WITH THESE SIGNS ***

- The access panel on the sign is generally protected by a small lock, but often are left unprotected. Upon opening the access panel you can see the display electronics. - The black control pad is attached by a curly cord, with a keyboard on the face. - Programming is as simple as scrolling down the menu selection to "Instant Text". Type whatever you want to display, Hit Enter to submit. You can now either throw it up on the sign by selecting "Run w/out save" or you can add more pages to it by selecting "Add page"

** HACKER TIPS ** Should it will ask you for a password. Try "DOTS", the default password. In all likelihood, the crew will not have changed it. However if they did, never fear. Hold "Control" and "Shift" and while holding, enter "DIPY". This will reset the sign and reset the password to "DOTS" in the process. You're in!

additional comment from a reddit thread: