Yes, everyone is mad about Anthropic chopping up millions of books, but here's the, well, million dollar question. Are you mad on more than just aesthetic grounds? Are you mad about what's happening to the world's knowledge and access to it…or is this just about paper and ink?

Em talks about how your bookish heroes destroy books every day, why what Anthropic did is (extremely technically) legal, and why other AI execs are using this bad press to make you think they're strawberry shortcake.

Photo by Limi change on Unsplash

Welcome to the Hybrid Pub Scout podcast, helping you navigate the

publishing landscape. I'm Emma Einolander, and I share insights so authors can be successful and

safe as they pursue publishing. Let's cut right to it. Book people are mad at Anthropic

again, again. I always think it's interesting that so many people, including said book

people and also the Pope, think Anthropic is the good guy AI company. Even authors who are

well aware of the whole pirating and scraping books for training thing are more likely to say

that Claude is more intelligent and personalized and less sycophantic, less generally evil

than ChatGPT. I guess when you're in a not being evil contest with OpenAI, it's like

you're told to scale a brick wall and then given a ladder, and that's on top of having to

pay out a 1.5 billion dollar payout to authors whose pirated works you use to fuel your

investment sucking machine. Anyway, despite the fact that the information we're about to

discuss has been out there for months and months, the most recent hubbub is over how

Anthropic legally bought up millions of print books, many of them apparently rare and/or out

of print, to train Claude. They partnered with a company called DataMation, and using a

hydraulic cutting machine, chopped the spines off, scanned each page at high speed, then

had the books hauled off by a recycling company. Bada bing, bada boom dunzo. Yes, they

destroyed all the books, and it turns out people don't like it when you do that, but let's put

a finer point on the don't like part, because I think what people are getting upset about

here might be a little too simplistic. You are mad about the wrong thing again. It's easy

to start throwing around Fahrenheit 451 in 1984. Anything something weird happens with

books. Like people always do this when we talk about book destruction, and I have

complicated feelings about that. To me, it's like the Godwin's law for books, which, if you

recall, is that old rhetorical thing about how you undermine your own argument as soon as you

bring up Hitler or the Nazis. But you know, a lot of us who were bringing up the Nazis and

Hitler in 2014 were dismissed, and then we ended up being right. So I should grant some

ground to the Bradbury and Orwell comparisons, I guess, by my own logic. This situation is

more than just about mulching paper, though. It's not just about the destruction itself. In

fact, my hot take-no book-burning puns intended-is that on the driest, most

practical level, destroying books isn't always a bad thing. It is this time, but hear me

out. And even when it could be considered bad, unrelated to AI companies, it's not as big of an

aberration as everyone would like everyone else to think it is. Here's what's bad: it's the

reason the books are destroyed, and what, if anything, is left behind afterward. That's the

issue. And before I get back to Anthropic, I'm going to take a bit of a detour to give you a

picture of all the blase reasons that books get destroyed that people are uncomfortable with,

including me. But you know, the light of truth must shine upon all of us, right? So let's talk

about your normal everyday ho-hum types of book destruction. I used to watch

people have these entire meltdowns on Twitter about art projects or viral trends that

involved destroying or damaging a book in some way. There was one a few years ago, you know,

in the pre-pandemic ages where people were like pouring cereal or or maybe Kool Aid or milk

onto books. I don't remember why, except it was probably rage bait. But these things always

throw people into this big existential angst. And I'll level with you: in the past,

I've been a total edge lord about this. Yes, even more than I am being right now. When it

comes to the sacredness of the book as a material object. I'd get really judgy when I'd see

the pearl clutching because um, like, do they know? Do they know about pulping? I know I'm doing

this right now, but stop. Okay, in grad school, every time somebody would talk about how

much they loved the smell of books and how it was why they got into their chosen.

Profession, I would roll my eyes, and if I were feeling really salty, I'd call them glue

sniffers because that heavenly life and career-changing smell is old dried glue and dirt. But

you know, going back to the whole undermining my own point thing, a lot of people love the

smell of dirt and gasoline and graphite takes all kinds, but edge lord or not, I was entirely

wrong. I am not entirely wrong, and this will come as an unpleasant surprise to some, but

a sad reality for others. The book guardians and purveyors that you love will almost all

have, at one time or another, been quote unquote complicit in destroying a book. In fact,

probably many books. A huge swath of librarians, booksellers, people who work in

publishing, including unfortunately me, have had to destroy books at one time or

another, whether by their own hand or by shipping them off to the big book farm upstate, where

they can freely play and frolic and run through the fields. But it helps to remember context.

Think of old textbooks, years out of date, full of inaccurate information. Short of holding on

to a few copies of those for posterity, do you need to keep every single one? No. And then

there are bookworms. No, not you, O person who loves crawling between the pages and rolling in

the text. I'm talking about real life, very hungry caterpillars who literally eat tunnels

through paper. Books can also get lice and bed bugs and create infestations in libraries, used

bookstores, and your home. And of course, in the wrong contexts, a room full of unused

paper is one of the biggest fire hazards there is. Yes, I learned that one from Ray Bradbury, but

then also 911. And then there's pulping, which imagine all the books that get printed and then

never get sold, the ones that don't get picked up at any point during their life cycle, maybe

they get remaindered first to be given one last chance, and that's when the books are sold

off in bulk and heavily discounted. If you've ever bought a book with one of those

little Sharpie hash marks on the outside, usually on the bottom, that's a remaindered book, and I

hope you didn't pay too much for it. And after that, if they still don't make it into a

customer's hands, they get sent back to the publisher or straight to a recycling center,

and then they're pulped, which is exactly what it sounds like: turned to pulp, used to make

toilet paper, literally. And I think that's bad. I'll say it. What it says to me before any

wild thoughts about censorship or conspiracy is that there's an overproduction and

overconsumption issue with publishing, and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody.

It makes sense. It makes sense. Generally, trying to figure out how many books to print in a

single run is a guessing game. Not even generally, like every single time, how many people are

going to want the book? Gee, I don't know. I hope it's a lot. So you have all of these

optimistic people or people who are trying to fudge their profit and loss statements, doing these

huge print runs of books and crossing their fingers. And it's not just that the authors' hopes

get dashed when they don't sell as many copies. It's also how hundreds of 1000s of unread

books get sidelined and eventually turned into toilet paper. So yeah, it's not the

destruction; it's the production. According to the Chicago Review of books. More

than 160,000 truckloads of unread books are wasted every year. That means the destruction

of 10 million trees, and this was back in 2023, before the explosion of AI-generated books,

and not taking into account how the number of books that real non-AI people have been

producing year after year. It's a lot, and the a lot part isn't just an issue for money. It's an

issue for planet Earth. Right now, the Spokane fires are making my air outside

unbreathable, and so I'm feeling a little passionate about waste, we're so desperate for people to

read books that I worry we've conflated a room full of books with some kind of pure morality.

Like it's harmless to have this many books, but if you have a few 1000 of them that nobody is

going to read, that real tragedy isn't the destruction.

It's the fact that all this waste is produced in the first place. By the way, I did an

interview a few years ago with Rachel Doane, where we got into some of the wild environmental

impacts of book publishing. It's episode 67, which I'll link, and you should check it out. Also,

if anyone else is researching sustainability in publishing right now, I would like. Chat

with you about your research. Message me Emily at hybridpubscout.com. I would

specifically like to hear what you've got to say about e-books and wasted energy and

electricity, because I would like a few more things to be upset about. Please and thank

you. So to tie this back into what we were talking about originally, the real tragedy

isn't about esthetics. It isn't, ooh, I'm sending a bunch of books that have been languishing

in a warehouse for years to get recycled. That's basically the same as being a foot soldier for

the authoritarian state. It's not that. It's that, and this is the thing that is more relevant

to this anthropic story. It's that we don't know what we're missing, and whatever it is,

access has been taken away from us, and that's true whether or not the books themselves get

destroyed. But it is especially true when they get destroyed. So getting a mad about the actual

destruction of books in and of itself is not missing the point. You're not missing the point.

You're just not taking it far enough. If your first impulse is to see a book being destroyed

and to get deeply viscerally upset inside of you, that is not bad. That is not a bad thing.

Even if Edge Lord M from 10 years ago would have been like, oh, you're making too big of a

deal out of this. It's not bad. You just need to go further, take it a few steps further, get

matter. This isn't about losing sacred objects. It's about losing knowledge and our ability

to access that knowledge and share it with one another. And it's about the loss of trust in

our ability to learn and know things at all. So why did Anthropic need all those books

anyway? So Project Panama, which is what Anthropic is calling this whole book scanning and

destruction project, was already reported on months ago by the Washington Post. The information

about it was included in the Bartz versus Anthropic filing, so this was back in February

that it was featured in the press. But the reason it came back up again is because of a

404 media report about the company ISBNDB, a book database that touts itself as having more

than 111 million books, 70% of which are unique, i.e. rare, i.e. not found through other

means or in other databases. So generally, ISBN DB's job is to provide data about books. It's

like a card catalog writ large. But the 404 post brought up some marketing copy that suggested

ISBN DB was trying to branch out a little bit, specifically to selling bulk orders of books

published before 2022 to AI companies for training, and they're not the only company who

has sold books to AI companies or aimed to, or whatever ended up being true with them.

Anthropic, particularly, is reported to have sourced their millions of books through a

company called Better World Books. But ISBN DB put themselves out there and crossed

their fingers and threw it into the universe and waited for the windfall of money and orders to

come. The post that they made, which has been taken down since the backlash, laid out the sort

of system and attitudes that companies that broker these deals have. Their chipper

marketing copy advertised exactly what an AI company would be looking for as they took on

an operation like this. So, for background, there's this thing called model collapse that

happens when LLMs train on themselves. This is the multiplicity problem: the clone,

the copy of a copy of a copy until everything's all jumbled up and nothing makes any sense

anymore. Clearly, the people who are doing this know that it's a risk. They need real people's

real words to make any of this work. Anthropic's internal document said they needed these

pre-LLM books because they would teach the bots to quote write well instead of mimicking quote

low quality internet speak, you see Slop does not live by Slop alone.

So back to that ISBN DB copy that they have since taken down. It said print books from the pre

LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination, that alone is a

significant advantage. Physical books published before this date, pre 2022, are structurally

clean of modern poisoning tools. LLM poisoning is something that's slightly different from

model collapse, but I'm. Not going to get into it. Go look it up. Have a good time. Ruin your

night, or give yourself some fun ideas. But they also said our books represent curated,

peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge structured in a way no web crawl can replicate.

Dense, edited, authoritative, and you can especially trust them as an AI company based on

how they signal with that rule of threes linguistic tell: quick, clean, classy. Notably,

they also advertise that they have strict NDAs for every sale because, and I quote, "the

optics problem is real. AI company destroys 2 million books is not a headline that generates

sympathy. Well, you got that one right, Buster. They also included some persuasive text to

assure potential buyers that this wasn't the same as censorship because the books

were at the end of their life cycle already. And if you listen to what I said when I was being

edgy earlier, that's not strictly untrue, but clearly there are other concerns here.

And if we take into account the feelings of human beings, that visceral ick you get in your

stomach when you see a book being destroyed or learn about it, the optics problem is even

less untrue. So since that post has been taken down, this is what replaced it, and this is

from july 30. We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our

site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBN DB has never purchased,

scanned, or sold a book for AI training or anything else. We don't train AI models, and we

never have. The page was a test of market interest. No such service was ever brought to

life. We've taken the page down. Our job is helping people find books. For more than two

decades, ISBN DB has been the card catalog of the book world, the data behind how bookstores,

libraries, and reading apps connect readers with titles. Data about books, not the books

themselves. That hasn't changed. I don't know about you, but I buy that. Now, do I think

Anthropic had some dastardly agenda to take away all the world's knowledge? I mean, I

don't think they think that's what they were doing. I think they're just racing against

every other company out there. They wanted to do this fast, and they didn't want to pay for

warehousing of all these millions of books, but they definitely knew people weren't

going to like it, and we know this for a fact because it's in their internal documentation

that they were purposefully trying to keep the whole thing secret. Project Panama is our

effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don't want it to be known that we're

working on this, whoopsie shouldn't have combined it with stealing then, which leads me to

why this is not prosecutable. According to court records, as Anthropic purchased millions of

print copies of books to quote unquote, build a research library, it destroyed each print

copy and replaced it with a digital copy. Their case claimed that they purchased all the

printed copies fair and square, and that because of the fact they destroyed the books and

didn't distribute any of them, the work was transformative and therefore not a case of

copyright infringement. The judge ruled the print original was destroyed, one replaced the

other, and there's no evidence that the new digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside

the company. And I've probably said this before, but remember, Anthropic came out on top when

it came to the copyright lawsuit, the authors who are getting settlements from this

aren't getting them because of copyright infringement. They are getting settlements because

their books were taken from databases of pirated books. So, this Project Panama aspect

counted as transformative work, at least according to this judge. So, according to Section

107 of the 1974 Copyright Act, if there is a transformative activity taking place, you're

good. And that's a very nebulous understanding of what transformative means.

Taking this risk has gotten a lot of, especially smaller creatives into trouble, but they

don't have deep pockets, or at least their investors, who they are taking money from, don't

have deep pockets. In this case, destroying the original print book and turning it into a

digital copy is transformative enough that these companies. Are fine. The information they churn

out based on this training is also transformative. This is all legal, and the best part is that

the destruction isn't necessarily mandatory. There are non-destructive ways to scan all

these books that are still legal. It just takes a lot longer, and you have to spring

for storage because, as you have probably deduced, it's not like they can just sell them

afterward. So really, if you think about it, the destruction is sort of incidental-just the

cost of doing business, right? Interestingly, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, who worked on the

Google Books project, to work on Project Panama, and that's presumably not only because he

knows how the actual operations of book digitization works, including non-destructive

digitization, but he also knew a little bit about what they could get away with legally, Google

ended up having to do some hoop jumping years ago when it came to making their book projects

transformative, i.e. snippets and excerpts rather than entire books posted online. But you

know, if you look at how this whole case shook out, destroying books could be considered an

extra layer of insurance. Also, interestingly, Google is still having copyright-related

problems of their own. Google is being sued by Hachette, Synage Group, and Elsevier, which you

know I guess enemy of my enemy is my friend. For more discussion about Elsevier, go

back to HPS's 17th episode with Jihad Moment, and it's not just Google. It's not just Anthropic.

A group of authors also sued Meta for the same thing last summer, and notably lost. All of

these companies are not getting pinged for copyright because, as long as they buy the books,

converting them from print to digital is considered say it with me transformative. I cannot

stress enough how little copyright and IP is helping authors with these issues right

now. It's just turning out to be another way of us all fighting over scraps. The tools we use

against one another, the weapons we use against one another, do not work when they are applied

to these big people, these big companies, but Anthropic has also given all its competitors,

who are getting varying levels of public hate and bad press, an opportunity to point away from

whatever the hell they happen to be doing. Elon Musk obviously leapt out and made a big show of

saying how Grok wouldn't be like those other anthropic monsters, he said in response to one of

the main X threads about this. I've asked the SpaceX AI team to preserve any rare books in a

library and scan them the hard way versus just cutting off the spine and scanning. Someone give

that man a cookie. It doesn't matter to me what kind. Remember, SpaceX AI is still

buying up all the books and training them, and then you know keeping them in a quote unquote

library in order to stay in line with copyright law. They can't distribute any of the

information that was in those books, so the books belong to them, and depending on how rare

they are, we don't know if anyone else has copies. We have no way to verify that the

sources the LLMs have been trained on are trustworthy, and that when the LLMs are prompted,

they'll actually reply with accurate information. I did see a few pics or it didn't happen

articles and tweets about how rare are these rare books actually? But you know they're

from like tech bros and crypto boys. So I'm gonna trust the independent booksellers who have

been fulfilling orders from these big suppliers like ISBN DB and Better World Books. And when

they say that one of a kind antique irreplaceable books are all included in these bulk

sales, I'm gonna I'm gonna go with them over the crypto bros. Okay, there is one key

difference between these companies hoarding the books and destroying them. In the case of

hoarding, there is a possible world where they fail in their mission, and somehow we get all

of these books back.

The public is able to access them again, and in that possible world, someone who actually

takes the time to look carefully finds the unique annotations, the other elements that make

these books special. Maybe they preserve them in an archive or digitize them for a library,

like the Internet Archive has been doing for years and gotten a lot of shit about. But for the

books that have been destroyed, there's no hope of that. We have no clue what we've lost

culturally, and that's the finer point on why this form of book destruction is unique and more

upsetting than other kinds. It's not just a loss of paper and ink. So if you. Have anything to

say to me? Email me at [email protected]. You know, yell at me for having bad

opinions about book destruction. Follow me on LinkedIn where I'm M Einolander and Blue Sky at

mino, and go read a book for all our sakes.