AI companies are buying up rare and out-of-print books by the truckload, cutting off the bindings, scanning every page, and then pulping what’s left. If you’ve ever sold an old book, inherited a box of them, or just like the idea that a rare title survives somewhere, this should bother you. Companies want books published before 2022, since those are less likely to contain AI-generated text that could pollute the data they’re collecting. The orders are random and tied to ISBNs, not to which books are rare or hard to find. A federal judge has already ruled that scanning purchased books and destroying the originals afterward counts as fair use under copyright law.