{"id":633857,"date":"2026-08-12T21:18:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T21:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/633857\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T21:18:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T21:18:15","slug":"lise-hand-ai-companies-destroying-books-to-feed-the-machines-what-fresh-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/633857\/","title":{"rendered":"Lise Hand: AI companies destroying books to feed the machines? What fresh hell…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Lise Hand<\/p>\n

Journalist-at-large<\/p>\n

IT\u2019S NOT OFTEN these days that a news story will cause my jaw to hurtle floor-wards as an outward expression of inner stupefaction. Not because the news is any less terrible than it has been at any point since, oh the last century, what with plagues, wars, a burning planet, a demented cult dismantling American democracy and so on. It\u2019s more a case of being in that state of insensible desensitisation experienced by the frog chilling in what it thought was a bubbling whirlpool, while idly observing that the water is feckin\u2019 roasting today.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, it was a nobody-died sort of article. The headline was even punctuated with a question-mark, which generally doesn\u2019t signal hair-on-fire panic. Yet suddenly I was in the grip of the sort of creepy feeling usually portrayed in apocalyptic films by a grizzled farmer staring at an empty sky and wondering aloud where all the birds have gone.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is Anthropic destroying books?\u201d asked The Guardian<\/a> last week.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t the first piece written on this relatively recent phenomenon, but it made for stark reading. It highlighted court documents relating to a North California district court copyright case, Bartz v Anthropic PBC, specifically a memo on \u2018Project Panama\u2019, one of the AI company\u2019s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. An internal memo explained what the project entails: \u201cProject Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.\u201d The memo advises discretion: \u201cWhy use a codename? \u2026 [B]ecause we don\u2019t want it to be known that we are working on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a complicated yarn, outlining the options considered by the company to get ahold of all the books in the world. Many options were legally fraught and time-consuming, and the march of tech does not wait for any man, woman or child. Therefore \u2013 money not being an issue of course \u2013 Anthropic embarked on a buying spree, snapping up print copies of every book available, in order to \u201cdestructively\u201d scan them to electronic form. As the court\u2019s decision relates, the company\u2019s vendors \u201cstripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size and scanned the books into digital form, discarding the paper originals.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Sucking up knowledge<\/p>\n

For the past couple of years, stories have been popping up in various countries of bemused booksellers receiving massive bulk orders for stock, often including odd or outdated titles. In April, Galway-based Kenny\u2019s bookshop told of a \u201cbananas\u201d order they had received for 5,000 titles, which included a range of obscure and eclectic books.<\/p>\n

This \u2018repurposing\u2019 of books from brain food to LLM-fodder was ruled legal under US copyright laws \u2013 hence the mass shipping of container-loads of bulk-bought books from Europe to America. But the fact that the courts ruled what it called this \u201ctransformative\u201d process as legally kosher doesn\u2019t detract from the hubristic horror of it all.<\/p>\n

\"open-book-burns-with-vibrant-orange-flames-on-a-forest-floor-covered-in-pine-needles-and-twigs-leaving-behind-charred-and-blackened-pages-as-symbol-o\"
\n Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n

Alamy Stock Photo\n<\/p>\n

Maybe this personal sense of existential dread is simply the massive overreaction of a lifelong bookworm. As a kiddo, I read by torchlight under the blankets after lights-out. Once I had read the entire works of Enid Blyton \u2013 which sparked the formation of various neighbourhood gangs and also a mercifully unfulfilled longing to be packed off to a boarding-school \u2013 I hit the local library. There was no YA \u2013 you read kids\u2019 books, and then you read adults\u2019 books. I\u2019d hoover up anything \u2013 science fiction, crime, historical fiction, the classics, stuff involving pirates or badly-behaved heroines.<\/p>\n

In convent school, a copy of Coleen McCullough\u2019s risque romance \u2018The Thorn Birds\u2019 whipped surreptitiously around the classes like a coronavirus, in the days before we knew that a priest having sex with a young woman wasn\u2019t just outlandish fiction.<\/p>\n

\"rachel-ward-richard-chamberlain-the-thorn-birds-1983\"
\n The Thorn Birds was adapted for TV in 1983 with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n

Alamy Stock Photo\n<\/p>\n

Studying English literature in college was a no-brainer. I fell in love with Flann O\u2019Brien and took an unshakeable set against DH Lawrence. I discovered Andre Gide and Jean Genet and briefly succumbed to pretentiousness. For a while after education, books were replaced by the twin distractions of music and boys, but inevitably fought their way back into my affections.<\/p>\n

How could they not? I was forever being astounded by novels. I was astounded by the so-called hard-boiled writing of Raymond Chandler, who could transform one gruff sentence into a whole tender short story. I was ROCKED by the opening line of Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s \u2018Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (\u201cWe were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold\u201d. Like, wtf?).<\/p>\n

I slept with the light on for weeks after reading \u2018Red Dragon\u2019 by Thomas Harris. I tore through \u2018A Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u2019 by Margaret Atwood and from the innocence of the 1980s, thanked all gods that it was pure sci-fi fantasy. Gripped by Maya Angelou, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, I became an enemy of the patriarchal status quo. On a whim, I picked up Hillary Mantel\u2019s new book \u2018Wolf Hall\u2019 in a New York airport and read it nonstop on the flight home and all through the next day and following night, dazzled with the apparent ease with which she scattered language like handfuls of rubies and sapphires onto the pages and conjured up the past like a witch. I\u2019ve been haunted by books, but also often irritated by them \u2013 it took years of spine-stiffening before I was able to abandon one half-read without feeling absurdly apologetic to the damned thing.<\/p>\n

Bookworms and bibliophiles don\u2019t dwell in towers of academe; we can read anytime, anywhere, and we know a thing or two about the human condition. Give me five minutes alone with any potential partner\u2019s bookcase, and I\u2019ll have a fair sketch of their heart. No bookcase? Swipe left and move swiftly along. Petrichor is all fine and dandy, but biblichor is our jam.<\/p>\n

And a book is a book, no matter how it\u2019s experienced. eReaders are a gift for travellers, BookTok is a brilliant resource, book clubs are marvellous proof that reading can be both a solitary pursuit and a bonding activity, and the current audiobook boom is proof that we can read with our ears \u2013 though there are indications that the eyes still hold the advantage. Some neuroscientists argue that when it comes to understanding a story, the brain draws on many of the same language networks whether the words are conveyed via the eyes or the ears; others insist that the slow, reflective process of print book perusal allows us to analyse and reflect on a text in a manner that digital media struggles to replicate.<\/p>\n

One question: why?<\/p>\n

So why is at least one AI company destroying books? History has repeatedly shown that nothing good has ever happened when regimes obliterate reading material, as did Glavit in the Soviet Union, China\u2019s Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and book burnings in Nazi Germany. In fact, more than one classic novel has issued dire warnings<\/a> from the past about the dangers of such actions \u2013 Ray Bradbury\u2019s \u2018Fahrenheit 451\u2019 in which Firemen burn books to suppress independent thought and maintain social conformity, and (inevitably) Orwell\u2019s \u20181984\u2019 which features state-enforced rewriting of history and the destruction of unorthodox materials because \u201cwho controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"new-york-new-york-usa-30th-apr-2026-bookseller-liz-hopkins-views-a-fine-first-edition-of-nineteen-eighty-four-1984-by-george-orwell-offered-by-burnside-rare-books-for-75000-seen-at-the-pres\"
\n Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n

Alamy Stock Photo\n<\/p>\n

But, but, goes the counter-argument \u2013 these eviscerated books are for LLM training purposes only, not to rid the world of printed works, whether fiction or non-fiction. And when the machines have all the knowledge of humanity, everyone will benefit from access to such a deep well of collective wisdom.<\/p>\n

Nope, nope, not buying it. There\u2019s something viscerally repellent about the image of a vast warehouse where countless books are being methodically dissected to be fed into the voracious maw of a learning machine. Books may be non-sentient, non-living objects, but the ideas, ambitions, sorrows, hopes, humour, lyricism, loves and fears of their authors breathe through their pages.<\/p>\n

What happens if, now knowing everything, the next logical step is to eradicate perceived imperfections such as texts not in tune with modern strictures? Anybody for \u201cIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of financial security must be in want of a life partner\u201d? Anyone?<\/p>\n

God almighty. Off with me to a bookshop to get a hit of biblichor. While I still can.<\/p>\n

Lise Hand is a journalist and writer. This column runs every Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lise Hand Journalist-at-large IT\u2019S NOT OFTEN these days that a news story will cause my jaw to hurtle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[6006,359,9,10,267969,3809,267970,267971,267972,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,267973,2336,7,8,2855,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-633857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-anthropic","tag-books","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-burning-books","tag-column","tag-death-of-education","tag-death-of-knowledge","tag-death-of-literature","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-no-brave-new-world","tag-opinion","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-voices","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117084626962683927","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}