AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
404 Media Emanuel Maiberg
AI companies are bulk-buying millions of old printed books from marketplaces and ISBNdb, a book database service, specifically because pre-2022 books are guaranteed free of AI-generated text that could degrade training models. Since April, book dealers report historic spikes in sales—one seller went from 20 books weekly to hundreds—with large, seemingly random purchases of books with ISBNs, suggesting systematic bulk acquisition. AI companies destroy the physical books during scanning to save storage space, a practice courts have ruled is transformative fair use, allowing them to acquire clean training data while avoiding the contamination risk from internet-scraped text.
Why it matters
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
