Two months ago, in my article Will Taiwan and Hong Kong Disappear in the Age of AI?, I discussed Anthropic’s Project Panama: a large-scale operation that purchased vast quantities of second-hand books, sliced off their spines, scanned the pages, extracted text through optical character recognition (OCR), and then destroyed the originals.
Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, was trained on millions of legally acquired print books alongside more than seven million pirated e-books. The resulting copyright lawsuits were settled in 2025 for over US$1.5 billion. Because Hong Kong and Taiwanese titles are scarce in shadow libraries, the overwhelming majority of Claude’s Chinese-language training data comes from mainland China.
Last month, a number of media outlets followed up on the story. Compared with my more self-interested concern for Taiwan and Hong Kong, most coverage approached the issue from the perspective of humanity as a whole: accusing Anthropic of exploiting legal loopholes, lamenting the destruction of books, or even denouncing the practice as a form of “digital book burning” that erodes human history and culture.
Yet Anthropic is hardly alone in scanning and destroying used books to feed AI systems. Recently, reporter Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media traced a bulk order of around a thousand rare books purchased through Biblio, an online marketplace where buyers remain anonymous. By placing an AirTag in the shipment, he followed the books across four states until they arrived at Amazon’s LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas. The investigation further revealed that a unit inside Amazon, codenamed VGT3, was responsible for removing book spines and scanning pages for AI training.
Better to Gather Dust Than Be Consumed by AI?
As the public condemns AI—while continuing to use it every day—I have neither the intention nor the standing to defend AI companies. But it may be worth considering another perspective: if these companies had not done this, would those second-hand books, long abandoned on used-book shelves, have been fulfilling the value they deserve? If we truly treasure these works, why did we not buy and preserve them ourselves? What logic underlies our grief over the destruction of books that had already been forgotten?
The problem of second-hand and out-of-print books having value but no market is structural. No one person is responsible, yet all of us are implicated. Even in countries with small populations, it is unrealistic to expect people to buy and preserve books indefinitely—let alone in densely populated places such as Hong Kong, where living space is among the most expensive in the world.
And even if someone could somehow collect every book ever published and preserve them all, that would merely trap them in another kind of cage. Information, like capital, derives meaning through circulation. This may be an uncomfortable thought, but when AI digests, decomposes and recombines books—allowing fragments of them to flow into newly generated information and creative works—it at least grants those forgotten books a modest afterlife. The process also provides income for second-hand bookstores. Apart from booksellers themselves, few of us are in a position to say that we would rather they forgo that income than see books scanned and destroyed.
It is easy to condemn destruction. The harder question is why so many books had already been abandoned.
The destruction of large numbers of used books pains me deeply, though I would never dare call myself a true book lover. Yet my sadness predates Project Panama and even the birth of ChatGPT. Not because I foresaw the rise of AI, but because I have long found it unbearable that most books go out of print within years—or at most decades—and are quietly forgotten. Long-time readers of this publication know that I have spent years advocating for ways to preserve books and keep them alive.
After Rights Revert, Most Stories Simply End
Apart from enduring classics that maintain steady sales, every book eventually faces the possibility of going out of print. More often than not, the reasons are commercial.
In the Chinese-language publishing world, contracts typically last three to five years. Whether the initial print run is 500 copies, 1,000 copies, or more; whether a book goes through one printing or ten, publishers stop reprinting when sales slow. Remaining stock is sold until the contract expires, or the title quietly disappears from shelves.
In theory, once a contract ends and publishing rights revert to the author, the work can find a new publisher or be republished independently. My experience suggests otherwise: for most books, that is where the story ends.
The reason is simple. If a book remains commercially successful, the contract is likely to be renewed. If a publisher chooses not to renew or reprint, it usually means the book no longer sells. Even when rights revert to the author, the work’s commercial value is limited, and republication is often a losing proposition.
Moreover, authors usually own only the copyright to the text itself. Rights to editing, layout, photographs, and cover design typically belong to the publisher. To bring a book back into print, much of the production work must be redone. Among the writers I know, only a tiny minority are devoted enough to undertake this labour as a passion project. Most simply allow their books to fade into obscurity, keeping only a few copies as souvenirs.
E-Books Are Not the Enemy—They Are Allies Against Forgetting
But all the books discussed so far share one thing: they are printed books. E-books, by contrast, have no printing costs and no need for warehouse storage. As long as an author wishes to keep a work available, it never has to go out of print. Indeed, when there is no physical “print run” to begin with, the very concept of being out of print loses its meaning.
Once we understand that e-books are not the enemies of print, but its allies—that the relationship is complementary rather than competitive—the story changes entirely.
If we are troubled by AI giants absorbing everything, like Majin Buu swallowing the world whole, the best response is simple: publish digital editions alongside printed ones. Project Panama may be deplorable for the way it treats physical books, but as long as a digital version exists, a work can never truly disappear.
As an author, you may be reading this and thinking: creating an e-book is not impossibly difficult, but it is certainly not as simple as pressing a button or asking AI to cast a magic spell. Even if one wants to do it, time and expertise are often lacking.
With this in mind, Just Books is willing to produce e-books free of charge for all publishers and independent authors in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These titles can be made available through the 3ook.com library, where revenue is shared according to reading time, or distributed through commercial e-book platforms. Whether all that remains is plain text that needs reformatting, or even if the original files have been lost and require rescanning, we are prepared to help—for one reason only: to preserve culture and safeguard history.
Contact us: [email protected]
Pixar’s Coco reminds us that physical death is only the first death. True death comes only when the living forget you completely. The same may be said of books. Going out of print is merely a first death. A work truly dies only when it is forgotten by readers—or when its author chooses to let it be forgotten.
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