Booksellers suspect AI firms are buying and then destroying rare books

If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies that are destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul.

So book lovers fear it’s likely that the practice is happening on a grander scale than is currently being reported and that some physical copies of books will be lost forever. What makes this destruction extra painful, though, is that it doesn’t have to be this way.