I stopped buying physical books years ago—not because I didn’t care for them, but because I couldn’t justify the space. Then I saw the news last week: AI companies are now buying up secondhand books by the pallet load, scanning them, and tossing the originals. Not just any books—rare ones, first editions, even out-of-print titles. The worst part? They’re using intermediaries to hide the fact that the books are being destroyed. Here’s the kicker: since the start of 2025, more than half of all new content on the internet has been AI-generated. If this trend keeps up, we’re staring down a future where most of what we read wasn’t written by humans at all. The question isn’t just whether we’ll notice the difference—it’s whether we’ll still have the physical books to compare against. Technical Overview The most interesting thing about this system isn’t its speed or scale—it’s that it’s untouched by machines. Most AI systems today rely on either pre-trained models or fine-tuned ver...

I spent the weekend watching a bookstore I love crumble into a data center. Not the building itself, obviously, but the effect was the same: another chunk of physical knowledge reduced to code, page by page, never to be held again. Here’s what’s happening right now. In 2025, for the first time, AI-generated text makes up more than half of all new content published online. The logical next step? AI companies have quietly begun buying up used bookstores, library sales, and private collections—not to resell, but to scan every last page, then pulp what’s left. The raw material isn’t just text; it’s the untainted language, the handwritten marginalia, the smell of old glue. Once it’s digitized, the originals disappear. The kicker? The scans aren’t for readers. They’re for machines learning to mimic human thought before the last human-readable copy vanishes. If you’ve ever held a book older than you are, you’ll get why this feels like burning a library to keep the fire warm. Techni...