Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI
rzk
91 points
15 comments
August 17, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (5 comments)
Analemma_
There's nothing in this article supporting the claim that rare books are being destroyed, it just has a link to a paywalled article from 404 Media.
alexthedigger
Tech crunch used to be tech news, now it’s ai slop with a biased agenda.
anygivnthursday
Another discussion on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336050
ChrisArchitect
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 and previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
littlecranky67
Well they have to destroy them after scanning, else it is a copyright violation. Maybe not in the US, but in a lot of jurisdictions you are allowed to make copies/scans of Books, CDs etc. but if you sell the media, you have to delete the copy. Given that anthropic was just fined a $1bn fee for torrenting/piracy, we cant really blame the companies for shredding the books after a scan. We should blame copyright laws.