AI is quietly scanning and then shredding tons of rare books...

AI is quietly scanning and then shredding tons of rare books... - Revolver News

revolver.news

There’s something deeply disturbing about watching a civilization destroy its own memory.

We usually picture that kind of destruction happening somewhere else, under some fanatical regime like ISIS, which storms into a city, burns the books, smashes the statues, and wipes out anything that doesn’t fit its version of Islam.

The world watched in horror as ISIS militants destroyed ancient artifacts and cultural treasures because history itself offended them.

But what happens when the people doing the erasing wear business casual, work in tech, and call it “digital preservation”?

What happens when books are cut apart and shredded so an AI company can vacuum up the information and toss it into the dustbin of history? It’s just like when streaming services alter old movies, remove controversial cartoons, rewrite descriptions, or tuck away parts of our culture because modern audiences might find them offensive.

Sure, the censorship may look cleaner and more civilized, but the principle is the same.

History should never be judged by the standards of the moment. What happened in the past should not be altered, hidden, or destroyed when it fails some PC test today.

And yes, that includes things like old Looney Tunes cartoons. Those cartoons are part of the cultural record. Many reading this watched the original Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons after school, but today, it’s impossible to find those OG cartoons on any streaming service.

Preserving history doesn’t mean endorsing everything in it… it means understanding that times were different, and that’s perfectly okay.

But what AI is doing to rare books should make everybody stop in their tracks and demand a halt in the production line.

It turns out that AI companies are buying books in enormous quantities, cutting off their spines, scanning every page, and shredding the originals afterward. The companies apparently prefer books published before 2022 because they contain no AI-generated text, making them more valuable as clean training material.

That means rare and irreplaceable books are disappearing into Big Tech, leaving no original behind.

Hedgie:

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.”

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb’s website literally says “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation.”

I’ve covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it’s irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it’s legal. So it’s going to accelerate.
“We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re… pic.twitter.com/0YPd8N2oi5

— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) July 27, 2026

Preservation usually means protecting something so future generations can still see, touch, study, and understand it. Cutting the spine off a book, feeding it through a machine, and shredding it into oblivion sounds more like destruction to us.

And the secrecy makes this whole thing even worse.

But there may be another piece of this story, and it’s even messier.

A second-generation bookseller has a second theory about what’s going on.

His family owns Houston’s largest used and rare bookstore, and he says they’ve gotten a lot of these strange bulk orders.

He believes not all of these books are heading directly into AI shredders. He thinks many are getting swept into a resale operation involving Amazon.

Charles D. Becker:

I’m a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston’s largest used & rare bookstore and I’m building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don’t think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But “rare” here isn’t what you’re picturing. It’s The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you’re about to resell, not one you’re about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don’t want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That’s more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it’s quieter: books that don’t sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we’re feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn’t. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That’s what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

I’m a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston’s largest used & rare bookstore and I’m building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I… https://t.co/IK7OE8f1DG

— Charlie D. Becker (@charliedbecker) July 28, 2026

So, perhaps not every rare book is being fed into an AI wood chipper machine.

Either way, the result is probably the same.

A book disappears for good.

This is how history vanishes in the modern world. One downed statue or one shredded book at a time.

History doesn’t always get taken down with flames, sledgehammers, or masked ISIS terrorists.

Sometimes it happens with scanners, algorithms, streaming edits, and corporate cleanups.

But the original always matters… always.

Yes, digital copies preserve the words. But it can’t preserve the object, its markings, its history, or the simple fact that it survived long enough to reach us. And the original can’t be changed to fit “modern times,” and that’s the whole blessing of the hard copy.

We were horrified when ISIS destroyed the past because it didn’t fit their beliefs.

We shouldn’t become comfortable doing the same thing because our version comes with better “progressive” branding.

— — — — —