The Artificial Intelligence (AI) race has a new victim — second-hand books. Over the past summer, reports have emerged of AI developers around the world purchasing vast quantities of used books. Once acquired, these volumes are destructively scanned: Their bindings are cut off and the resulting loose pages are fed through automated scanners, rendering the physical volumes unusable.

This interest in used books stems from two factors. The first is technical. A growing body of literature on model collapse suggests that recursively training AI models on slop (or AI-generated data) can progressively erode their ability to track distributions. The problem is commonly compared to making photocopies of photocopies, a process that produces ever blurrier results. This insight has led AI firms to prize authentic human-authored text. But, as it is becoming harder to discern whether the text we encounter today has already been shaped by AI, developers have become interested in tapping an uncontaminated source — books published before the large language model (LLM) era.

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The second factor is legal. In the landmark case Bartz v. Anthropic (2025), Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic violated the law when it downloaded pirated copies of books from websites like LibGen. Anthropic was, however, entitled to destructively scan books it had lawfully acquired because it was effectively exchanging one format (print) for another (digital). It was also “fair use”, Judge Alsup ruled, to utilise the resulting scans for “training”, since “generative” AI is “quintessentially transformative” — it seeks not to “replicate” works but to generate “new text”. This decision encouraged AI firms, especially those........

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