AI companies are buying up rare and out-of-print books and shredding them

 by Olivia Murray

We (should) all know about the destruction of the library of Alexandria, a series of events that robbed mankind of priceless ancient texts, containing wisdoms, tales, and untold amounts of information about antiquity. Bits of knowledge that truly (and literally) were lost forever to the ashheap of history.

And, we’re witnessing a 2026 version of the tragedy: AI companies are buying up rare and out-of-print books—many with no other surviving copies—reportedly as part of an effort to train their AI models. These corporations are then shredding the original copies, because it’s *slightly* cheaper than storing the books.

Prominent journalist Sydney J. Harris once noted that “History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.” For years, I held that sentiment to be true, but upon further ponderance, I realized he could have only been speaking to the uneducated and uninformed leftist masses, because in no way did that observation apply to the average person with any grasp of history (as elementary as it may be), who, by virtue of being at least somewhat enlightened, is not politically left.

When we see a government accomplish gun control and consequently ramp up the oppression, it’s not some “cunning” or “disguised” bait-and-switch. The tyranny that comes after rendering the citizenry defenseless is entirely predictable.

When a society rejects the morality of the Christian faith—in our case a worldview that became the pillars of the Western nations—the invasion of immorality in the public sphere is not a “cunning” or “disguised” leftist scheme. Rome did exactly that, a mistake we seem determined to replicate.

When barbarians from the darkest corners of the world flood into a civilized  Western (Christian) culture, whether they’re the Islamic hordes of Mehmed II or the sub-Saharan migrants of today, the chaos and dysfunction ushered in are not results of some “cunning” or “disguised” political campaign.

This is all a + b = c.

And, the disappearance of books time and again, whether it’s a byproduct of war and political turmoil (as in the case of Alexandria), a byproduct of corporate profit—the benefit-of-the-doubt plausible-deniability excuse I’ll give the AI companies, though I also suspect it’s intentional censorship—or outright censorship, is also not some “cunning” or “disguised” repetition history. It’s a key part of erasing a people and eradicating a culture.

Joseph Stalin’s regime destroyed millions of books. Government agencies like Glavlit, along with secret police and library commissions, routinely purged public and private libraries, wiping out works considered counter-revolutionary, religious, or bourgeois; Stalin’s cronies also slaughtered countless intellectuals during his reign of Great Terror.

Pol Pot seemingly took it a step further, overseeing the destruction of nearly “all written works, libraries, and formal education.” Intellectualism became a capital offense, and the radical push to reset Cambodia to “Year Zero” saw roughly 80% of Khmer literature erased.

Mao wasn’t much different.

Ironically, we see the theme of destroying/preserving books/knowledge commonly in fiction too, even appearing in some of literature’s greatest works.

In 1984, main character Winston plays a huge role in erasing history, tossing things down the Memory Hole; he then reads a “forbidden” text from the alleged resistance leader, Emmanuel Goldstein.

In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag does an about-face, and instead of burning books, he risks his life to preserve the knowledge they contain.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the new government, the Republic of Gilead, purges the libraries and bans the people from reading.

In fact, the fantasy series I’m currently reading happens to include the theme, with the “Great Library of Parthos” being moved and hidden once its location becomes known to the world’s tyrannical overlords.

You see, destroying books to erase history—a history that keeps on repeating—to subject a people is nothing new. Though, in contradiction to Harris’s opinion, the manner in which it’s being repeated now is not cunning or disguised.  Yes, I believe the AI companies ripping our books to shreds are mostly motivated by profit, but they’re also not friends of humanity, or in the business of promoting informed people, so I can’t help but deduce it’s a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone effort.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/07/ai-companies-are-buying-up-rare-and-out-of-print-books-and-shredding-them/