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Unredacted files reveal Anthropic’s ‘secret plan’ to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world'
(www.thebookseller.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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When a bookstore goes out of business or just can't sell a book, they don't return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn't make it okay.
Words and ideas don't become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.
Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It's not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it's still frustrating to see it.
This seems more like an indictment of the practice of physical publishing than destructive book scanning, in which case I generally agree. There are a host of industries with baked-in inefficiencies that our life experiences have conditioned us to accept as normal or unavoidable when really have no business persisting in the modern world. Printed books is definitely one of them.
I wouldn't say print books have no place today, it can't be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it's definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.
Yeah, you're right to clarify that, saying printed word has absolutely no place is hyperbolic and wrong. In cases where it is necessary to maintain parity of information access, paper is fine.
Even teenagers sometimes prefer dead tree books to ebooks. Back when I worked in a public library, we could tell when a book was assigned reading because we'd suddenly get 10 requests for our 2 copies. The students had access to the ebook, they just preferred paper.