Take a book from your bookshelf – any book, but preferably a favorite – hold it in your hands, run your finger along its spine, crack open its new or yellowed pages, skim the author’s words, reread your own notes and the sentences you underlined with black pen, and tell me you don’t feel a twang in your heart. Tell me you don’t instantly recall the very first time you read this book. Who you were. Where you were. With whom you were. The year. The season. The weather the day you started or finished it.
Now think about something you have read online, or maybe a podcast that you listened to, that you thoroughly enjoyed, loved even. Try to find it in your web browser bookmarks. Pinpoint the link you copied and pasted into an email you sent to a friend recommending this article or that podcast episode. Is the website where it was published still a working domain? Can you even recall what was discussed during this digressive, three-hour-long conversation? How many times do you even revisit podcasts? I bet these things are much harder to locate. I bet if you managed to locate them and then re-read, or re-listen, your reaction would be muted, at best.
Books are different. They are physical objects, for one. But, because of this, books you truly love have a unique power – the power to trigger memories the moment you look at them or touch them or even smell them. Of course, the best books stick with you for life. They follow you, emotionally if not physically. They almost become like friends – the best of friends. You can go years without them, and when you meet them again, after so much time, it is like nothing ever changed. You pick up right where you left off.
I still remember the first person who taught me this, an old teacher of mine who had a devout love for classic Russian novels. Over the course of a semester, he probably repeated the same story about the first time he read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy as a teenager in Florida a dozen times. He was a lifeguard in the summer, and when the beach was empty because of a thunderstorm, he would remain in the stand by himself, plowing through the epic novel as lightning flashed over the ocean and rain pelted the roof. This was also the summer his father, a renowned local brain surgeon, died suddenly. It had a profound impact on him, he told us – both the book and his father’s death. And he was what? In his mid-60s? Yet, he was still telling this story. Repeating it. Once a week, at least.
This was back in 2016. He was waxing nostalgic, obviously, but also trying to get students who were not in love with books yet to take the dive and discover a passion. Even then, he was concerned about declining mass literacy and the rise of social media apps so alluring and addictive that its users, once hooked, could never even begin to tackle a work as long and demanding as War and Peace. I wonder what he thinks of the world a decade later.
Because books today not only face declining irrelevance from the usual suspects — TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, video games, smartphones, podcasts, the internet in general — some books are being destroyed, right now, by AI companies that wish to train their models on long-form, high-quality texts that predate the internet. What would be a better way to train the model? Feeding it slapdash Reddit posts, or feeding it a rare, lengthy, expertly-written book stuffed with primary and secondary sources, and a raft of citations. And what is easier than directly dealing with authors over copyright infringements, or using pirated copies and risking more lawsuits from creators? Buying the books and then destroying them.
Emanuel Maiberg, a reporter at 404 Media, recently discovered that a purchase and shipment of rare books were delivered to an Amazon warehouse where AI models are trained. (Ironic, given that Amazon began as an alternative seller of hardcopy books.) It’s actually been happening for a while, Maiberg explained in a recent interview.
We’ve known that AI companies have been doing this since a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which is one of the major AI labs. And that lawsuit revealed that they were purchasing books in large quantities, that they were scanning them, and that in order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner. I was interested in that. At some point, a bookseller who’s been in the business for a long time reached out to me and said that they have been getting very large orders. I obviously wanted to know where these books ended up. So we managed to get a tracking device into one of these orders, which is how we discovered the Amazon warehouse.
An exhibit from the mentioned case, Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, in a Northern California district court, revealed how AI giant Anthropic tried to keep the plan to destroy and scan books a secret under the codename “Project Panama.”
“What is Project Panama?” an internal memo from Anthropic asks.
“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
“Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
This is a disturbing trend reminiscent of the 1951 dystopian Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, in which “firefighters” burn books and the buildings where they are stored to censor speech and erase “harmful” knowledge. And it raises daunting questions about how humans will preserve historical records, art, and literature in the future. How many rare and antique books have already been destroyed in these ‘destructive scanning’ facilities? How can one even keep track of such rare books? And if AI models never stop learning, is there ever a point when AI companies will ever stop shredding and destroying books?
It is also all the more reason to hoard physical books as if they were bricks of solid gold, to build up your own personal library, and preserve a tiny but vital slice of an old civilization and way of life. The future of books certainly looks bleak, not only because of declining mass literacy but because of AI companies that have the gall to literally destroy the past. But we can still be like the protagonist of Bradbury’s novel, Guy Montag. We can be exiles, protecting the past in our minds and, hopefully, on our dust-covered bookshelves.
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