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Posted on 08/02/2026 1:08:39 PM PDT by Twotone
It’s an ominous scene. A warehouse crammed with books set to be sliced open, scanned and then pulped by an AI lab. Australia is fighting back.
If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.
Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said. “I’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
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Two similar articles were posted last week and were deleted by the mod.
Booksellers are having a kitten.
No sympathy from me.
Go woke, go broke.
Last few times I’ve been in a bricks and mortar bookstore, I left without buying a bloody thing.
How about pulping the AI slop machines instead?
You don’t think publishers crank out dead tree slop...?
My parents and grandparents had homes full of beautiful antique furniture and none of the grandkids wanted a single piece of the furniture. Sadly, the world moves on and a museum will become more and more important to the younger folks so they can see how we lived, but saving lots of old stuff makes not a lot of sense to the young generations.
and when AI goes bust it will all be lost , exactly what they want
Next step will be AI shredded Founding Father’s documents, all Bible translations, and factual history.
Relevant, my FRiends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_VmMbr85F0
(And if you’ve ever had a performance review altered after you’ve signed, or a thousand “likes” vanished from the old twitter. . . you’ll understand)
These books are mostly not “one of a kinds”. They are not pulping and shredding “millions” of rare books. They only need one of each title, and there are not a million different “rare” titles, even if you include periodicals.
The used book stores are likely having a mini-bonanza, selling slow-moving stock.
Frankly, as New York Times Publishers never saw fit to reissue George Gilder’s “Sexual Suicide”, maybe the only major anti-women’s lib book of the early ‘70s from a major publisher, the AI slop machine probably laid down $50 for a used copy, so that its contents can be made available on-line. THAT IS A GOOD THING.
The AI slop machine is not raiding the Smithsonian or the libraries at Oxford and Cambridge. MANY of the feed for the AI slop machine are going to be re-issues, and not rare at all.
Fahrenheit 451/1984. Why shred them? I can think of only one reason.
I am afraid the the future will be more like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_ZfZaRCWTI
(start at 1:52)
Old furniture lasts...I guess this new generation likes junk...made in China.
Someone posted a video of a machine that scans books and turns the pages. It’s not necessary to destroy the books:
https://x.com/jasteinerman/status/2082495092334412202?s=46
> Why shred them? I can think of only one reason.
Because after they are pulled apart for scanning they obviously can’t be sold.
> Someone posted a video of a machine that scans books and turns the pages. It’s not necessary to destroy the books:
That is true but it only works for a fraction of the books (AFAIK).
The article claims to be addressing the destruction of millions of rare books. Why would anyone want to do that rather than selling the rare books to people who might want a non-digital book?
I have no problem with someone who wants to read a book on a computer or other digital device. Why would anyone have a problem with someone who wants to read a book printed on paper, perhaps bound in leather? What’s the desire behind destroying the printed books?
I worked in a document imaging company for 27 years. That is pretty much what they do with books. A paper shear is used to to cut the spine off the book. Thick covers are scanned using a flatbed scanner. The pages are run through a high speed duplex document scanner. The faster scanners can do over 200 pages per minute when scanning letter or A4 sized paper. Once the images are verified, the pages are either trashed or in some cases, boxed up for some future need. The value of the books are lost but the information can then be shared world wide.
Anything online is there forever!
Unless big corp or a government doesn’t want it there.
How could Lincoln have had a Gettysburg Address if he never lived there?
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