Австралийские антиквары бьют тревогу: редкие книги сканируют для ИИ и уничтожают

Australian booksellers have stated that the rare book market has been drawn into the data supply chain for AI training: old editions are being bought up in bulk, scanned, and physically destroyed. This was reported on August 2, 2026, by the British newspaper The Guardian.

What rare book traders are alarmed about

Owners of Australian antiquarian bookshops are recording a troubling pattern: unknown wholesale buyers are acquiring rare and antique editions in large batches. According to the traders, the books are scanned to form training datasets for AI, and the physical originals are subsequently destroyed — as disposable material that has served its purpose.

Tim White, owner of the Melbourne independent shop Books for Cooks, is preparing for the upcoming Melbourne Rare Book Fair — a rare book fair at Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne. As he arranges carefully preserved books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves on temporary shelves — each copy wrapped by hand — he explains: the physical object carries no less value than the text within.

"Sometimes books tell you more than their contents," says

Tim White, Books for Cooks.

For professional antiquarians, this is not rhetoric. The physical characteristics of a particular copy — the condition of the binding, the paper material, traces of previous owners — are part of its documentary value and often determine the final price at auction.

What is lost when digitising for AI?

An antiquarian book carries context that digital scanning cannot reproduce:

• Handwritten marginal notes — evidence of who read the book and how, centuries ago
• Bookplates and inscriptions — part of the provenance, the historical DNA of the specific copy
• Binding, paper type, watermarks — dating the edition more precisely than typographic colophons
• Unique inserts and illustrations — often not reproduced in any other copy

Rare books by definition exist in a single or extremely small number of copies. The destruction of a physical original for the sake of digitisation is an irreversible loss of a cultural artefact. For the antiquarian community, this is a catastrophe: what disappears is not the content (which remains in the scan), but the object itself — a bearer of history that cannot be recreated.

Another dimension of the AI and copyright debate

The large language model industry has been under pressure for several years over the use of books in training datasets. Authors and publishers around the world — in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union — have filed lawsuits against major AI companies, accusing them of unauthorised use of texts.

The case of the Australian booksellers adds a new dimension to this controversy. Until now, it has been conducted mainly around copyright in digital content. Now the focus falls on physical cultural heritage: the destruction of an antiquarian book, unlike the deletion of a file, is absolutely irreversible.

It is important to note: the booksellers are speaking of suspicion, not verified fact. A direct link between bulk purchases and specific AI companies has not been publicly established. Nevertheless, the pattern of rare editions disappearing en masse from the market has alarmed the professional community enough to attract press attention.

What this means

The alarm raised by Australian antiquarians points to a hidden cost of scaling AI: the race for training data is moving beyond the digital space and affecting physical cultural heritage. The debate about AI and copyright is expanding to a more fundamental question — about the irreversible destruction of material artefacts for the sake of digital training. A destroyed book, unlike a deleted file, cannot be restored.