{"slug": "ai-firms-buying-old-books-the-hidden-cost-of-training-data", "title": "AI Firms Buying Old Books: The Hidden Cost of Training Data", "summary": "AI firms are buying old books in bulk to scan for training data, often discarding the physical copies afterward, a practice that raises preservation concerns. The author, writing on a tech news site, notes that while efficient data collection is valuable, destroying books eliminates the chance to preserve marginal notes, bindings, and other historical evidence. The piece highlights the trade-off between practical data needs and cultural preservation.", "body_md": "# AI Firms Buying Old Books: The Hidden Cost of Training Data\n\nLet me be clear: I'm not against efficient data collection. Anyone who has built a retrieval pipeline knows the pain of PDFs with garbled text. A physical book scanned with a proper sheet-feed scanner can give you high-quality text that's already segmented. For a company training a model on real-world knowledge, that's gold. If the alternative is crawling sketchy ebook pirate sites, then buying a used bookstore's inventory feels almost ethical.\n\nThe \"destroy\" part is what unsettles me. True, some of these books are in terrible condition — yellowed pages, glue crumbling, covers half-detached. They're not museum pieces. But scanning a book with the intent to discard it means we're permanently losing the chance to preserve the physical object. Libraries and archives care about multiple copies: they add marginal notes, bindings, ownership marks, evidence of how people read.\n\n[Next LinkedIn's new \"Seems like AI slop\" button: too little, too late? →](/en/news/4536/)\n\n## All Replies （0）\n\nNo replies yet — be the first!", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-firms-buying-old-books-the-hidden-cost-of-training-data", "canonical_source": "https://promptcube3.com/en/news/4538/", "published_at": "2026-07-31 12:23:32+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-31 12:26:08.339873+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["LinkedIn"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-firms-buying-old-books-the-hidden-cost-of-training-data", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-firms-buying-old-books-the-hidden-cost-of-training-data.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-firms-buying-old-books-the-hidden-cost-of-training-data.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-firms-buying-old-books-the-hidden-cost-of-training-data.jsonld"}}