ISBNdb, a company specializing in book data, has removed content from its website that advertised the sourcing and destruction of books for artificial intelligence training purposes. The now-deleted pages claimed ISBNdb could act as a "streamlined partner for sourcing printed books in bulk, tailored to your LLM training needs, delivered at the scale AI demands."
The content was brought to light by 404 Media, which previously reported on the practice of AI companies using third-party book buyers to obtain large quantities of books, some of which were allegedly destroyed after being scanned for data. An archived version of the deleted page and a related blog post titled "Reframing the Destruction Narrative" remain accessible via the Internet Archive. In that post, ISBNdb suggested that a book's value was not lost but rather "migrated" when its "paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one."
However, in a statement to 404 Media, ISBNdb now claims that the deleted page was merely a "test of market interest" and that "no such service was ever brought to life." Despite this assertion, secondhand booksellers have reported an increase in online orders from third-party buyers, describing these as "waves of orders that did not fit with usual customer patterns."