--- title: AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books description: AI companies, most notably Anthropic through its internal 'Project Panama', are buying rare and out-of-print books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-companies-destroy-rare-and-non-recoverable-physical-books-kdfpi79uv twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books | daily.dev og:description: AI companies, most notably Anthropic through its internal 'Project Panama', are buying rare and out-of-print books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-companies-destroy-rare-and-non-recoverable-physical-books-kdfpi79uv og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Kdfpi79UV.png og:image:alt: AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary AI companies, most notably Anthropic through its internal 'Project Panama', are buying rare and out-of-print books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning them for LLM training data, and then shredding the physical copies. A company called ISBNdb facilitates this at scale, offering up to one million titles per order and advising clients to frame the destruction as 'digital preservation' under NDAs. A federal court ruling in the Anthropic copyright case deemed the practice legal under fair use, since only one copy exists at a time. The result is the permanent destruction of rare, irreplaceable books — many pre-2022 titles specifically sought because they are free of AI-generated content. Booksellers across Europe and the US have reported suspicious bulk orders for obscure titles. The author argues this represents a cultural catastrophe akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and calls for legal or public pressure to stop it. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 130 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-31). **TL;DR:** The HN community is largely skeptical of the article's framing, arguing the books destroyed are mostly common recent textbooks rather than rare irreplaceable works, and that the outrage is manufactured — though a minority pushes back that deliberate destruction is categorically different from accidental loss, and that copyright law is the real villain forcing this outcome. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 35% mixed · 50% skeptical **The case for** - Scanning preserves the intellectual content of books that would otherwise be warehoused and eventually discarded anyway. - The destructive scanning method is a well-known, economically necessary technique for high-volume digitization. - Copyright law, not AI companies' malice, is what forces destruction of the physical copy after scanning. - The books actually being scanned appear to be recent academic textbooks (2020–2021), not rare historical artifacts. **The pushback** - The practice is deliberately planned destruction, not accidental loss — a meaningful moral distinction. - If AI companies go bankrupt, even the digital scans could disappear, leaving nothing. - Framing the destruction as 'digital preservation' under NDAs is deceptive and self-serving. - Non-destructive scanning options exist but are being skipped for cost and legal-liability reasons, not necessity. - Concentrating knowledge in a single corporate scan creates fragility that distributed physical copies do not. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Most commenters dismiss the 'rare books' framing as misleading outrage-bait, pointing to evidence the titles are common recent textbooks, though a vocal minority defends the concern about deliberate destruction and misplaced copyright law. **Hottest debate:** Whether the books being destroyed are genuinely rare and irreplaceable or merely common, unsold academic titles — a factual dispute that determines whether the entire moral case holds. **Open questions** - What happens to the digital scans if the AI company goes bankrupt or shuts down? - Is there any legal mechanism that could require non-destructive scanning or deposit of a physical copy? - Why can't AI companies partner with libraries or the Internet Archive to scan non-destructively under a different legal framework? - Does the fair-use ruling that permits destruction actually require it, or merely make it safer? **Highlights** > >They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning. Nope! Actually this article has a list of the books they were scanning: https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phis... >provided Fortune with the email and subsequent spreadsheet containing 3,001 titles, mostly published between 2020 and 2021 by academic publishers like Emerald Publishing, Elsevier, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press, and ranging from business and education to engineering, public policy and medicine. So not rare, mostly recent textbooks. The headline of this article is a lie designed to outrage you. > — [Legend2440 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128235) > At least 80% of the anger here is misdirected, we should be blaming stupid copyright laws created over the last several decades by big-media lobbyists. Even if the person running the scanner treated every book with utmost love, museum-level care, and holy sanctity... copyright law would still require them to shred/burn the pristine antique book at the end anyway, or else they get sued for bazillions by the modern companies that "own" the book's contents. > — [Terr\_ on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127499) > I find it interesting that no one cared if these books were destroyed before, but now they are suddenly valuable and worth preserving? These are books that were sitting in some warehouse waiting to be destroyed until it was discovered that AI companies would buy them in bulk. Most of these books are 'rare' because no one bought them, so they didn't print many, and the ones they did print weren't sold so they sat in a warehouse. I feel like people are imagining some rare, handwritten book transcribed by some 17th century monk. That is not what these are, they are part of the millions of published books that never get any traction, are barely sold, and then are destined to fade into obscurity as they are eventually cycled out of the warehouse and into the incinerator. But now that AI companies want to add a 'scan them first' step before destroying them, they are suddenly precious and must be preserved? > — [cortesoft on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127794) > If we value things according to their monetary value we must conclude that Elon musk is more valuable than every teacher in Americas labor for the next decade. Economic value is oft divorced entirely from any notion of real value. What you are describing derisively as "feels" is actually nuance the very essence of intelligence is not reducing complexity to tapioca. Destroying the last copy of a rare book reduces the sum total of human knowledge even if its not one already of note. Historically current thinking isn't the best and most accurate judgement of value. We cherish many works that were not notable upon publication or even in the author's lifetime. Previously the works were distributed and hard to lose all at once now they are possibly inaccurately scanned and even that slightly lossy data may disappear all at once in a wave bankruptcy especially if the economy crashes again as seems to happen every 10 to 20 years. I suggest you ruminate instead of patting yourself on the back > — [michaelmrose on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127830) > > That means that they were already getting destroyed somewhat and not being recoverable, even without AIs. If there is just one or very few copies of a book or it ends in a particular buyer, or in warehouse prone to fires, not surviving to floods, rats or whatever. There's a difference between accidental or negligent destruction, and planned and deliberate destruction. You're describing the former, but these AI companies are doing the latter. > — [palmotea on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128884) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127284) · 42 points · 130 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Vanishing Page: AI Firms Scan Then Destroy Rare Book Editions](https://daily.dev/posts/the-vanishing-page-ai-firms-scan-then-destroy-rare-book-editions-g6gbdbxtc) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI Book Scanning: Just What Is A Rare Book?](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-book-scanning-just-what-is-a-rare-book--4livbix9o) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI firms are buying old books for slop-free training data](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-firms-are-buying-old-books-for-slop-free-training-data-t6hwh6vfl) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-companies-destroy-rare-and-non-recoverable-physical-books-kdfpi79uv) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-companies-destroy-rare-and-non-recoverable-physical-books-kdfpi79uv","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-companies-destroy-rare-and-non-recoverable-physical-books-kdfpi79uv"},"datePublished":"2026-07-31T19:40:43.457Z","dateModified":"2026-07-31T21:47:42.782Z","description":"AI companies, most notably Anthropic through its internal 'Project Panama', are buying rare and out-of-print books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/d016ae51b700644ff3083c81c0a75cc0?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/d016ae51b700644ff3083c81c0a75cc0?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-companies-destroy-rare-and-non-recoverable-physical-books-kdfpi79uv","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"llm,anthropic","timeRequired":"PT5M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books"}]} ```