The modern book burners: The tech giants buying thousands of second-hand books - so they can tear off their spines, scan their precious contents… then destroy them
The geology of western Peru. Cornish pioneers in South Africa. The defunct Eastern Counties Railway. Cheeses of the world. The jewellery of Hong Kong.
When Compass Books in Dartmouth, Devon, received an order earlier this summer for second-hand volumes on these subjects and many more, seller Lucy Hingston was delighted - if a little baffled.
And when she discovered that the buyer appeared to be a shipping company based at Heathrow airport, her suspicions increased.
Soon the 49-year-old was speaking to other second-hand dealers around the country - and discovered that Compass Books wasn't alone.
There is now a growing realisation that Britain's second-hand bookshops are being pillaged - not by voracious collectors of prized first editions but by Silicon Valley tech firms for a far more insidious purpose.
Today, the Daily Mail explains how millions of second-hand books are being bought in bulk and sent to warehouses across America, where the pages are sliced from the spine before being fed into industrial scanners, harvested for their text, and later destroyed.
This process, known as 'destructive scanning', is the latest method of gathering the vast reams of data being used by Big Tech to train its AI chatbots.
'It's a moral dilemma,' says Lucy. 'They're my books, my babies. I feel like we've been eaten by the AI monster. It's difficult.
'I want the sale, but not to somebody who will b****r up everybody's books.'
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16088549/The-modern-book-burners-tech-giants-buying-thousands-second-hand-books-destroy-FRED-KELLY.html