In 2006, Vernor Vinge published a novel in which a company digitizes a university library by destroying it. Books stripped from their bindings. Pages blown through the air, photographed in flight, reassembled as searchable data. The paper goes to pulp.

The novel is Rainbows End. Vinge set it in 2025.

He was off by a year.

Every #AI lab now wants text written before machines started writing, and that means old paper. So books get bought by the million, spines get sliced off, pages get fed through high-speed scanners, and the originals get discarded. Rare editions included. A US federal judge has already ruled the practice legal. Buy the book, destroy the book, keep the file.

Authors, archivists, and librarians have started organizing against it.

Vinge wrote it as a warning. The industry read it as a workflow.

In the novel, the fight is never really about books. It is about who gets to decide what a civilization keeps.

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Authors, archivists, historians and bibliophiles have launched an online war against tech giants and artificial intelligence developers after an increasing mountain of evidence shows they’re buying rare and antique books en masse and feeding them to large language models—only to slice off their spines and destroy the original print copies in the process.

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