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Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking nice on a shelf.
But AI companies are interested in neither.
To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for also doing.
But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.
This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.
Now, as 404 Media reports, this practice has become prevalent enough that even well-established book sellers are looking to cash in on the AI boom. One called ISBNdb, which boasts the “world’s largest book database,” extolls that the “world’s best AI training data is setting on a shelf,” upholding these physical texts as uncorrupted by shoddy AI writing that’s already polluted so much of the internet (and indeed, newer books).
“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage,” it explains in an article on its website, as quoted by 404. “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”
Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.
As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.
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