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THE DESTRUCTION OF books never looks good in hindsight.

In medieval Florence the Bonfire of the Vanities saw the followers of Savonarola burn books, paintings and other supposed provocations to sin. Nobody now visits Florence and complains there is too much art.

In May 1933, German students burned tens of thousands of books deemed “un-German”. The largest bonfire drew about 40,000 people to Berlin’s Opernplatz and featured an address by Joseph Goebbels.

The square now features a memorial: a subterranean room lined with empty white bookshelves, viewed through glass set in the cobblestones.

The Nazis also oversaw the wide scale destruction of libraries in Warsaw, Poznan and more: the destruction of the library of Belgrade in Serbia was one of the largest book bonfires in European history.

Even the gradual slow decline and destruction of the library of Alexandria is seen as a loss for humanity.

We now have a modern cohort of book destroyers: big tech companies looking to train Artificial Intelligence.

Undeterred by history, the bad press that comes with data centres and promises to take our jobs, or destroy humanity, Silicon Valley companies are now buying printed books in bulk, removing the bindings, passing the pages through scanners and destroying or recycling what remains.

Admittedly, their reasons and methodology are different from history’s biggest book burners. They’re not buying and destroying books for ideological reasons. This time it’s capitalism pure and simple.

They don’t want to destroy the contents of the books, but to preserve it as the raw materials for training AI models. To an AI laboratory, a second-hand book is not a work to be read. It is a small container of organic training data. The laboratory is a foie gras factory that force-feeds pre-loved cultural items into a statistical goose to create a stochastic parrot.

In 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit that alleged the use of pirated books as training data. The lawsuit brought a secret operation called Project Panama to light. Project Panama involved buying millions of second-hand books and getting contractors to scan and destroy them.

A US federal judge ruled that this constituted legal fair use because the books were being bought fair and square and destroyed. The destruction was important, as the book had to cease to exist as a public object so that it could survive as a private corporate asset.

This year 404 Media, an independent media outlet focusing on technology, put a tracking device inside a shipment of scarce books and followed it to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.

Employees said the warehouse received large shipments of books, removed the bindings and scanned them. The facility’s mascot is a dinosaur holding a book in its teeth, which suggests that even the graphic-designers knew what was going on.

It is ironic that Amazon, once the innovator in using digital technology to people, is now feeding people’s books back to digital technology. Maybe it’s the circle of life.

The Irish Times recently reported that Kenny’s in Galway got an order for 5,000 obscure books that seems to be destined for the AI woodchipper. Bookshops in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Australia have reported strange bulk orders for thousands of unrelated titles.

The suspected culprits in these instances are AI companies. Having scraped everything the internet offered them freely, and in some instances used books obtained from illegal torrent networks as training data, they need more words. So now they’re going analogue. It’s the AI equivalent of getting into vinyl.

Strictly speaking, bulk buying a second-hand book doesn’t deprive the author of any payment or royalty. Authors don’t usually get any payment when an existing book is resold. But buying, scanning and pulping books does turn the author’s text into some sort of industrial raw material. The AI companies buy once and claim the knowledge indefinitely. The author gets nothing in return.

Every useful technology has its inputs. The problem is that we have put a price on the courier, warehouse, scanner, camera and pulping machine while assigning a price of zero to authorship, human skill and public memory.

Markets can be ruthless with the things we forget to price. This doesn’t mean that AI training should be prohibited. Models and robots can spread knowledge, improve productivity, remove people from dangerous work and make scarce skills more available.

Digitisation can rescue works that might otherwise disappear. The mistake is to allow destruction, surveillance, secrecy and non-payment as part of the business model.

Industrial AI training needs a licensing system that recognises both written and embodied knowledge. The precise mechanism could involve collective licensing, statutory payments or negotiated access. What matters is that the people and institutions that create reliable human knowledge participate in the value extracted from it.

And what about booksellers? Initially, they may get some very welcome large orders. But they may be jeopardising their own futures. Automated bulk buying of books may reduce the amount of books in circulation and the viability of the second-hand book market.

As a bibliophile, I must admit, I hate the idea of destroying books, or anything that further undermines bookshops. Perhaps destructive scanning of scarce works should trigger a duty to deposit a physical or digital preservation copy with a national library.

Marketplaces could let booksellers exclude destructive buyers. Acquirers could be required to keep chain-of-custody records. A “do not destroy” register could protect local, rare and research-significant works.

Savonarola believed the bonfire would purify Florence. The Nazis believed fire would purify German culture. Nobody setting out to destroy cultural artefacts imagines that history will miss what is lost. The same goes for the capitalist imperatives of our AI companies. We can’t stop them buying in bulk, but we can resist.

We can go to a bookshop. We can buy something with a cracked spine, an old inscription, a train ticket edged in the pages. We can choose things that are real, imperfect and pre-owned over synthetic.

Today we call this buying a book, in time it could be an act of conservation.

Steve Dempsey is a media and technology expert and commentator. 

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