“Every collection is important”
AI firms quietly bulk buying rare books face resistance from booksellers.
If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies that are destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul.
It’s indeed depressing to imagine piles of book spines waiting to be fed into wood chippers while torn-out pages are cropped, scanned, and trashed. But that’s the cheapest and easiest way to scan books as fast as possible, and AI companies are in a race to advance their models by training on the kind of engaging, high-quality long-form texts that can only be found in books. So book lovers fear it’s likely that the practice is happening on a grander scale than is currently being reported and that some physical copies of books will be lost forever.
What makes this destruction extra painful, though, is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Google patented a non-destructive book-scanning technology in 2009 that AI firms could use to efficiently scan books—if they were willing to slow down and invest in the process. It’s not perfect, however; studies have found that the curve of the page can distort text, and pages can be missed. As Wired reported, glitches can happen when workers move too quickly, including disembodied hands obscuring pages.
Overall, the trade-offs in cost and speed may not appeal to AI firms looking for the cheapest way to scan millions of titles, and Google’s method may not be the best way to handle rare books anyway. The Internet Archive, which helps libraries preserve aging collections, has long understood that scanning old texts takes time and attention to limit handling, and that’s why it’s considered such a human job.
For AI companies bent on finding shortcuts, the Internet Archive’s method may feel almost alien.
But if you’re a book lover looking for a balm while parsing rumors of AI-driven book destruction, an old post from 2021 describes how the Internet Archive scans books to avoid damaging even the most precious rare books. In it, a book scanner who has been with the Archive since 2010, Eliza Zhang, offered a moment of zen by explaining what she likes so much about scanning books “the hard way.”
The Internet Archive did try going the automated route, the post said, even testing out “commercial book scanners that feature a vacuum-powered page-turning arm.” But “it turns out those automated scanners didn’t really work well for brittle books, rare volumes, and other special collections—the kinds of material our library partners ask us to digitize,” the Internet Archive said.
“The job requires keen concentration,” Zhang said, since the pages of “very old, fragile books” are “paper thin.” In the post, Andrea Mills, who helps lead the Archive’s book-scanning operations, explained that “clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages.”
To ensure each rare book only has to go through the scanning process once, Zhang takes her time. She carefully raises the scanner glass with a foot pedal each time she turns a page, then adjusts the cameras and ensures the page is readable. She also takes note of any fold-outs, setting a reminder to go back and scan the inserts so that bonus materials aren’t lost while documenting the main pages of the work.
The whole time, she understands that if a page is skipped or an image is too blurry, Internet Archive’s proprietary software will stop the process and prompt her to scan it again. Practice makes perfect, though, and she reports a low error rate after more than a decade of finding a rhythm in the job.
At the time, Zhang had scanned “more than 3 million pages, 14,000 foldouts, and 18,000 items (mostly books),” the post said, with the goal of guaranteeing “zero errors.”
Ars asked the Internet Archive for comment, but Chris Freeland, the director of library services, said the post detailing Zhang’s work is “still the best description of our scanning process today.”
The post came after a video of Zhang’s book scanning got 1.5 million views on what was then Twitter, accompanied by a caption that would resonate with book lovers appalled by AI-driven book destruction today.
“At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book,” the tweet said. “We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way—one page at a time.”
Rare booksellers flag suspicious bulk orders
Ever since a lawsuit in summer 2025 outed Anthropic for destroying millions of print books to train its AI models, book lovers have moved to defend some of the most precious collections from what feels like AI firms’ endless quest to feed all the books in the world into their large language models.
The biggest fear for people who want to see books preserved through the training process is that AI firms will callously pulp rare books that can never be replaced.
As The Atlantic reported last week, social media “raged” after two recent reports indicated that AI was already endangering rare books. First, a Telegraph report accused Silicon Valley of destroying millions of rare books and “shredding the originals,” then 404 Media reported that a book-database company called ISBNdb was advertising that it could help AI firms source books in bulk.
This backlash was expected, with ISBNdb reportedly warning its clients that the optics were bad. Anthropic started using a codename—“Project Panama”—for its destructive book-scanning in an effort to keep it hidden from the public.
There is no indication that Anthropic ever destroyed rare books, and the company has denied doing so in statements. It’s also true that some AI firms are helping preserve rare books. OpenAI and Microsoft, for example, are working with Harvard librarians on an initiative to train AI models on about 1 million public-domain books dating back to the 15th century. Others, including Elon Musk’s xAI, have publicly said they won’t destroy rare books to train AI. In a post on X, Musk said that he “asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.”
But not everyone is convinced that the biggest AI firms are sincere in their promises to preserve rare books, even if copyright law allows them to destroy copies of books they’ve purchased. Critics on social media and Reddit have pointed out that Musk didn’t say the xAI team would not destroy any books, and it’s unclear how his company defines a “rare” book.
Meanwhile, rare booksellers continue to flag strange orders, recognizing that most sincere buyers tend to seek out single books, not order large batches of widely varying selections.
Just yesterday, an Irish bookstore called Kennys flagged a “bananas” order for 5,000 obscure titles, The Irish Times reported. Unlike bulk orders placed by universities or big libraries, this order seemed suspicious because the buyer made no attempt to haggle on the price—which has now become an obvious “red flag” that AI is potentially involved, the Times reported.
Although some booksellers said they could benefit in the short term from large orders, they fear that selling to AI firms that are indiscriminately destroying their collections “may be signing their own death warrant,” the Times reported.
Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop told the Times that AI is “terrifying our industry,” and he plans to refuse orders likely destined for AI training in an effort to protect authors’ rights to their work and readers’ access to hard-to-find titles.
“Booksellers tend to be at the forefront of a lot of moral dilemmas and political and ethical issues. In most scenarios, it is not for me to decide,” he said. “However, if they are taking a book and scanning it with a view to taking intellectual property, then Kennys do not want to be a part of that.”
It’s possible that public backlash will pressure the biggest firms to adopt methods like the Internet Archive’s, which focus as much on preserving rare books physically as they do digitally. But it’s heartbreaking to imagine the alternative, where rare books become even rarer, especially for those who love the feeling of holding an old book in their hands.
Zhang knows the allure of rare books, occasionally pausing her work to read parts of the titles she scans. When asked what she liked most about her job, Zhang responded with the same gusto that many book lovers feel while browsing the shelves in stores like Kennys.
“Everything! I find everything interesting,” Zhang said. “I don’t feel it is boring. Every collection is important to me.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
