> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
How is a book from 2021 considered rare in this context? There's almost certainly a digital copy of it in existence prior to Anthropic purchasing a print edition.
Niche text. It's not impossible that there was only ever under a thousand of them printed and released into circulation.
A digital copy would exist somewhere, of course. But for us, that only matters if we can buy or download it. And for AI companies, that only matters if they can get a digital copy DRM-free and licensed permissively enough.
Rare or not, destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act. I don't know man, it's not so long ago we used to view nazi book burnings as an archetype of evil. Today companies are offering book-burning-as-a-service and it hardly causes a stir.
Is it destruction or format shift? Technically the books still exist; just that they're now digital. There's no content loss (what I imagine comprises a "book") unless any digitization is then deleted.
The 404media article mentions notably https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi... which says:
> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
> Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021)
How is a book from 2021 considered rare in this context? There's almost certainly a digital copy of it in existence prior to Anthropic purchasing a print edition.
Niche text. It's not impossible that there was only ever under a thousand of them printed and released into circulation.
A digital copy would exist somewhere, of course. But for us, that only matters if we can buy or download it. And for AI companies, that only matters if they can get a digital copy DRM-free and licensed permissively enough.
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Non of those are rare. All a available in libraries for ILL.
so... not rare, then? another fear mongering article lying to everyone.
Rare or not, destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act. I don't know man, it's not so long ago we used to view nazi book burnings as an archetype of evil. Today companies are offering book-burning-as-a-service and it hardly causes a stir.
Bearded German man was right.
Is it destruction or format shift? Technically the books still exist; just that they're now digital. There's no content loss (what I imagine comprises a "book") unless any digitization is then deleted.
> destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act
It's a routine act in any publisher stock management.
Well, there's a difference between destroying books to erase knowledge and control people, and destroying books because it's cheaper.
Easy claim to make when you’re not responsible for storing those books.
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