Books are to be read not destroyed

Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?
BBC headline 15 Aug 2026

The Book is a Book, not Disembodied Information
Nassim Nicholas Taleb 11 Aug 2026

Quotes from each article:
"When court documents were unsealed last month it also emerged books were being destroyed in the process of training Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude."

"This inseparability of the content and its embodiment is the reason I’ve decided to keep every book I’ve read in the original format in which I have read it. This is not for any functional or pragmatic reason. This is not for any reason other than existential: once you’ve read a book, you are effectively rereading it every time you take a glance at it."

Yes, training models with books is fine, we are all getting the benefit. But Big AI could at least pay for the books to be put back together and given to libraries rather than pulp them.

Oh, and do maintain your own physical pre-2022 library. You and your descendants will savour the physicality of the book and the certainty of human-only knowledge.

A propos of nothing, our company Sevva AI is named after a Sankrit word meaning "Service for the benefit of humanity"