Watch books being scanned page by page amid rebellion against AI giants
Scan your rare books to keep them alive.
Scanning books. Screenshot from Internet Archive via Instagram.
- Internet Archive scans books page by page and says it avoids cutting bindings.
- A resurfaced video is fueling calls to digitize rare books before AI firms acquire them.
- Reports claim some AI companies buy, scan, and destroy physical books for training data.
- A 2025 US ruling found AI training on digitized, legally purchased books can be fair use.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
As the race against time to save rare books and prevent them from being usurped by AI giants accelerates, an old video has reappeared showing how the Internet Archive scans books page by page to preserve them.
On Instagram, a viral video from 2021 has started circulating again, showing how Eliza Zhang, a book scanner at the Internet Archive, is scanning an unspecified book in an attempt to digitize and preserve it.
"We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way – one page at a time," the Internet Archive said back then.
However, these days, this video might have another meaning, as there's an ongoing fight against AI giants that buy, scan and destroy books.
Cybernews has already reported that Amazon was caught acquiring a rare book that ended up in its AI training facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, where employees tear the books apart to prepare them for scanning.
Calls for people to start scanning rare books are now circulating online, with a post from this August claiming that Claude's developer Anthropic has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM and then destroying them all.
"So why destroy physical books? Behind it lies the AI race and the interests of capital: 1. It prevents these books from being scanned and used for training by competitors. 2. It avoids legal risks. 3. Destroying books is cheaper than lossless scanning," the author of the post, Anna, said.
As for the legal side, in 2025, a US district judge ruled that digitizing legally purchased physical books and using their digital copies to train AI is fair use.
However, this is not only about legal issues.
"Once AI has absorbed even the last sentence written by humans on paper, all that will remain on the internet will be AI’s own words. In such a world, how can human civilization be preserved?" Anna concluded.
