AI companies are purchasing millions of physical books to scan and destroy them for training data, a practice validated by a June 2025 court ruling that deemed destroying purchased books as fair use when a digital copy replaced the physical one without increasing the total copy count. Company ISBNdb is now marketing up to one million physical titles to AI developers, including non-digitized, rare, or out-of-print works, recommending destruction after scanning. No title-level evidence has demonstrated the destruction of a rare or unique book by Anthropic or any ISBNdb customer. However, the economic incentive created by the court’s copy-count reasoning makes physical preservation structurally disadvantageous for AI companies.
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