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 library's copy count unchanged.ISBNdb's current service and Anthropic's historical scanning program follow separate source chains. Physical disposal is the shared incentive created when books become scalable training data.The one-copy incentiveIn February 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for Google's 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 ISBNdb's current marketing and stands on its own documented procu...