AI firms are shredding physical books because copyright law is quietly rewarding them
ISBNdb is marketing physical-book orders of up to one million titles to AI developers, including material it describes as non-digitized, rare, or out of print. The offer, reported by 404 Media, puts a 2025 copyright ruling in an uncomfortable new light: discarding a purchased book can support the legal premise that its internal scan replaced the original while keeping the librarys copy count unchanged. ISBNdbs current service and Anthropics historical scanning program follow separate source chains. Physical disposal is the shared incentive created when books become scalable training data. The one-copy incentive In February 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for Googles book-scanning project, to develop a lawful route to a much larger research library. The company later spent many millions of dollars buying millions of print books. Service providers removed the bindings, cut the pages to size, scanned them, and discarded the paper originals, according to the federal court record. The Washington Post later reported on the project using material that had become public. The operation predates ISBNdbs current marketing and stands on its own documented procurement chain. The June 23, 2025 order reached two distinct fair-use conclusions. It held that Anthropics use of copies to train specific large language models was