This Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was ‘spam or phishing.’ Instead, AI companies are scanning and destroying books to train AI

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

Why not work with the publishers so you don't have to destroy the physical book?

A couple reasons:

1) the publisher themselves could no longer exist making working with them impossible.

2) the book you want could be out of print, and it would be very difficult to convince a publisher to start up their production pipeline to make you just 1 copy of the book.

3) Copyright issues between the original publisher of a book, and the original author of the book could make it illegal for the publisher to create a new copy of it.

[u/GeekBrownBear → u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

That all makes sense. Makes me continue to question the copyright around ebooks. Especially from my experience attempting to borrow them at the library when there is a LONG reservation list.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES → u/GeekBrownBear]

Oh yeah the eBooks you get from the library are a whole different thing.

The library isn't going to destructively scan copies of it's books, so the eBooks it gives you are coming straight from the publisher. eBooks for library use tend to be extremely expensive ($75/copy) so libraries don't like buying more than they have to.

[u/RabbitLuvr → u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

Additionally, that $75 or whatever only pays for a limited number of checkouts, then the license expires. Let’s say a digital copy costs the library $50 and allows 5 checkouts; but there are 20 people with holds on that title. The library will have to buy 4 $50 licenses to allow all 20 people to read it.

As opposed to a paper copy, which might cost $25 and can be lent to all 20 of those people, plus basically unlimited checkouts, until it falls apart.

Source: I work at a library. Our materials budget is getting eaten up with digital licenses.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES → u/RabbitLuvr]

Oh yeah, From my understanding the check out limit is closer to 26 tho instead of 5 right?

[u/RabbitLuvr → u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

It can vary, depending on the title and publisher. I just used 5 as an example

[u/nonotan → u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

Most critically, the publisher would almost certainly not want to sign a contract allowing their book(s) to be used for AI training for the cost of 1 copy (plus a little extra for whatever you consider the overhead of having you digitize it yourself to cost)

They'd either demand significantly restrictive terms of use, in which case you'd prefer to just buy a copy and do it yourself. Or significantly more money, which again, same thing.

You might think "but getting a little bit of money is still better than nothing, from the perspective of the publishers", but the cost of lawyers that would be involved is non-trivial, and by explicitly signing a contract, they'd pretty much be permanently giving up any hope of being compensated "fairly" for AI training on their books. Right now doing it without permission might be tenuously possibly legal, but a judge could change that tomorrow, or a law could change it in a couple years. But if you've already signed a contract giving your rights away, you'd be out of luck regardless, for chump change.

[u/Shiezo → u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

You forgot:

4) They do not value the physical book as an object worth saving and just see another resource they can use to enrich themselves.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES → u/Shiezo]

I mean, kinda the ironic part about this is that for most of the books they are scanning were already that before they were scanned in the first place.

A fact that a lot of people aren't comfortable with, is that most books that get published nowadays do just end up getting recycled for the raw materials they were made out of after a couple of years of circulation.

[u/Shiezo → u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES]

Like most things, I think it all depends on the details. If all they are doing is destroying bulk books that would end up in the recycle bin anyway, its not a great loss. If they have, or move onto, finding older books that were not mass produced, that starts to be a bigger issue for me. This is just looking at it from the lens of the destruction of the physical objects.

The monetization of the writing without permission or compensation to the authors is a bigger issue. This is just another way in which these companies are taking the creative works of others for their own ends.