Somewhere this week a book was bought, cut from its spine, scanned, and thrown away. Somewhere else a novel nobody has printed in a century was cleaned up, formatted, and handed to anyone who wants it, for nothing. Both are ways of taking text seriously. Only one of them leaves more of it in the world than it found.
Literary Hub, relaying a 404 Media report, describes Amazon buying books in enormous quantities, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process — the latest in a slow drip of revelations about other AI companies. The detail that lands is not the scanning. Scanning is copying, and copying is how literature has always survived. It is the second half of the sentence that stings: the original does not come back out.
A scan that ends in a shredder is not a copy. It is a transfer. The world gains one machine-readable file inside a training corpus, and loses one object that could have sat on a shelf for another eighty years waiting for someone curious.