Australian booksellers raise alarm over destruction of rare titles to feed AI
Australian booksellers are raising concerns over the destruction of rare titles to feed artificial intelligence. The issue stems from a practice known as 'destructive scanning', where physical books are scanned and then destroyed. This practice is now understood to be widespread among generative AI companies, with Australian secondhand booksellers wondering if they have been caught up in the AI supply chain.
- ▪A copyright lawsuit against AI company Anthropic revealed the practice of 'destructive scanning', where physical books are scanned and then destroyed.
- ▪The practice is now understood to be widespread among generative AI companies, with intermediaries facilitating the process.
- ▪Australian secondhand booksellers have experienced waves of orders that do not fit with usual customer patterns, with some vendors receiving large orders from a Canadian company called Zoom Books.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | the Guardian |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:12:40 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T16:20:46.389Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T16:20:46.389Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | eg85yIZTckuo · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A 400-year-old document recording a Spanish Inquisition exorcism at the Antiquariat Forum BV and Inlibris stall at the 2026 Rare Book Fair. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA 400-year-old document recording a Spanish Inquisition exorcism at the Antiquariat Forum BV and Inlibris stall at the 2026 Rare Book Fair. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The GuardianAI (artificial intelligence)‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AISecondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Stephanie ConverySat 1…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at the Guardian.
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