Irish bookshop and online retailer Kenny’s told The Irish Times this week that they have been getting some unusual book orders, received via email in the middle of the night and requesting upwards of 5,000 often obscure titles. The pattern seen in Galway fits with a global story of AI firms buying paper books and feeding them into the models that underpin chatbots. This process, which the industry calls “destructive scanning”, sees the spines sliced off thousands of physical books at a time, the pages digitised, and then the whole lot destroyed. The image of pulped books unsettled many readers, but is just a glimpse into larger, more troubling shifts in the economics of literature and publishing.

Something about the idea of destroying books feels instinctively wrong. We think of books as holders of knowledge and artistic beauty, as objects of pleasure, distraction or entertainment, full of the potential for human betterment. They are how we process ideas about the future and how we know about the past, transmitting humanity’s accumulated insights through the ages. They are a thing to be passed along, archived and rediscovered.

Reading Derek Scally’s piece, I imagined faceless robots consuming and discarding our literary history, an image perhaps more grounded in the wider pattern of destruction that is being meted out on authors, their rights and profession. Pulping literature is not the same as burning books, but the two feel closer than is comfortable. Book burnings are highly visual shows of power to erase ideas; destructive scanning is erasing them in a more subtle way – by destroying the viability of a livelihood built around creating and........

© The Irish Times