Like many booksellers, book collectors, and writers, I’m incensed by reports of AI companies destroying irreplaceable books after scanning them to feed the insatiable AI maw. So I was not surprised to discover that some AI firms are selling the scanned books to be turned into toilet paper.

I recently heard about a bookseller who received an order for a book to be sent to a Trifinity warehouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a common destination for AI company orders. The bookseller put a tracking device in the book and watched as it went to Kenosha, then Las Vegas, and finally to a warehouse in Mexicali, Mexico. The warehouse is part of a large Papel San Francisco paper plant.

The wasteful and disgraceful process by which AI corporations willfully (and now legally) destroy books is done simply to save a few dollars for an industry that is valued in trillions. The most egregious part is AI’s focus on pre-ISBN and pre-1970s books that are more likely to be out of copyright and less likely to attract lawsuits. This is resulting in the destruction of limited editions and irreplaceable books.

The Wall Street Journal [paywalled] has a story today about AI and book scanning which also mentions this tracking device. They call its destination a paper recycling plant, which is true but doesn’t describe what the paper is recycled into.