AI Book Scanning: Just What Is A Rare Book?

Hackaday reports that a handful of AI firms are buying books, removing their bindings, scanning the pages and then destroying the physical copies to claim a single legal copy for training data. Because the titles are ordered by ISBN, they were all published after nineteen seventy and are therefore mass‑produced rather than medieval manuscripts. Critics have labeled the practice a form of book burning, yet the article points out that the paper‑recycling sector already pulp millions of such volumes each year. The piece suggests the outrage may be more about the symbolism of destroying books than the actual cultural loss.

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