Lamenting the Books

02 Aug, 2026

I feel like I’m in mourning. Reading my friend Dirk’s post yesterday, I learned about the generative AI crowds’ bulk purchase and destruction of printed, often rare, books to train their models.¹ Buy the books, take them apart, scan and then pulp ‘em: good riddance, but thanks for the words. I don’t know why this discovery has come as such a shock; after all, today’s tech world was built on the infamous directive to move fast and break things, with no concern for who or what gets hurt in the process. And I also don’t know why I’m stunned that there are apparently people who see the practice as opportunity to make a quick buck; in addition to the AI companies themselves, go-betweens have been accused of making these goons’ purchases for them, to keep sellers (or a variety of others, probably with objections like my own) from knowing the fate of those bound volumes. They realize this cover-up is key; as the pitch of one of these dealers, ISBNdb, had it before being removed, “The optics problem is real…. 'AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”² As of the date of this post, their site now contains a “note” to clarify what they say they’re doing (or not):

We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book—for AI training or anything else. We don't train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life. We've taken the page down.³

It's a pretty weak explanation; “a test of market interest,” after all, doesn’t address whether the venture it was testing ever should have been proposed in the first place. Had there not been an apparent outcry, the “test” probably would have continued without qualm. And although I couldn’t find anything about their role on the site of Zoom Books, the company mentioned in a Guardian article, a Publishers Lunch teaser has them saying in May that “Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose.”⁴ I couldn’t get access to the full article—but as I was glad to see David Gerard and Amy Castor emphasizing, no one was ever accusing Zoom of doing the digitization or destruction themselves, only buying and selling to those who do.⁵

Again, none of this do-it-anyway m.o. should have been a surprise, especially given the fact that it (should be) widespread knowledge by now just how destructive AI is in terms of resource use and environmental sustainability.⁶ Water? Who needs it when you can get a bot to save you a minute and a half by writing a grocery list for you? Power and land use? Pollution? Let’s just forge ahead, so that kids won’t have to use their noggins learning how to craft a sentence on their own.

But yeah: it may just be because it’s new-to-me information that the callousness really comes through in this whole situation. There seems to be no understanding on the part of AI companies or their enablers that a book is more than the words it contains, that a printed book—or maybe any other material object—has meaning for the person who produces and holds and shares it. For rare books in particular, the pages and binding that are part of their essence, I guess I’d call it, were the result of real, hard-won craft. And there have always been and continue to be concerns about how authors feel about their work being used to train AI, this in spite of the recent federal ruling that Anthropic’s use of printed material for that purpose fell within fair use.⁷ But whatever; ISDBdn probably represents artificial intelligence boosters’ standard beliefs about bound written matter: “A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information. Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose.”⁸ The attitude fits with what feels like generative AI’s rush to general destruction, whether of the environment or anything meaningfully human—in some instances, actual humans as we know them.⁹

Damn it, though. Most of us would condemn the burning of books in service of an ideology. And I’ll allege that this overall aim of, and the belief of its promoters that the ultimate good entails, replacing the activities, output, and even thought processes that make us who we are constitutes an ideology—defined by Merriam-Webster as

1 a: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture

b: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program

c: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture.¹⁰

At what point, then, did it become acceptable to pulp books—and why not artworks or photographs or LPs or celluloid along with them?—in order to further an ideological program: a dismissal and outright trashing of the thought, craft, processes, and intentions that go into making human-produced work, in service to an ever-growing deluge of slop?

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