The Bookseller Using AI to Battle Back Against Big Tech’s Digitize-and-Destroy Campaign

The tech giants bulk buying old books to scan then destroy them

When Compass Books in Dartmouth, Devon, received an order earlier this summer for second-hand volumes on these subjects and many more, seller Lucy Hingston was delighted.

The bookseller using AI to battle back against Big Tech’s digitize-and-destroy campaign

To stop Big Tech from destroying physical books, one independent bookseller is using AI to build a global inventory database.

AI companies are destroying more books than you think, says bookseller

A bookseller estimates that the number of books being destroyed to train AI models is far higher than what’s being reported — somewhere in the tens of millions.

Why AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books

We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the outpu…