Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

Nine days after 404 Media reported that ISBNdb, a book database company, was pitching itself as a supplier of printed books for AI training data, the company quietly deleted the offending page and walked the whole thing back. On July 30, ISBNdb posted a note on its homepage insisting it has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else — and that the landing page in question was just "a test of market interest" that never turned into a real service.

The timeline tells its own story. ISBNdb removed the page titled "Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs" on July 28, two days before posting its clarification. The company describes this as choosing to "pivot away" from exploring demand for the service, while insisting its core book metadata API business runs unaffected. ISBNdb also responded to 404 Media's request for comment with the same boilerplate now sitting on its homepage, after ignoring the outlet's earlier attempts to reach it.

What got deleted is more interesting than what replaced it. One now-removed article argued that printed books published before 2022 are especially valuable training material because they predate AI-generated text and could help stave off model collapse. That same page suggested authors uneasy about their work being used this way could simply write in a manner designed to sabotage AI models — an odd piece of advice from a company selling access to those books. Another scrubbed page argued that buying secondhand paper books doesn't deprive authors of income, since those books already "fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators."

Booksellers told 404 Media they'd noticed a strange spike in orders — not just in volume, but in the randomness of titles and a willingness to pay wildly inflated prices, which one seller flagged as a telltale sign of AI-money buying. That pattern echoes a January copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, in which internal documents showed the company planned to buy and scan millions of printed books, destroying them in the process, sourcing some through a marketplace called Better World Books according to a Washington Post investigation.

ISBNdb's own now-deleted marketing material seemed to anticipate exactly this kind of backlash. "The optics problem is real," it admitted, noting that a headline reading "AI company destroys two million books" wouldn't generate much sympathy. Apparently the optics problem got real enough, fast enough, that ISBNdb decided the safest move was to pretend the whole thing was never more than a market test.