Antiquarian book dealers across Germany and the Netherlands have confirmed a pattern: overnight bulk orders from an intermediary firm, collection of the physical volumes, and no further word — because the books, once scanned for AI training data, are destroyed [1]. The practice is legal. A U.S. court found it falls under fair use for purchased copies. That ruling is the most important sentence in this story, and it is the one most coverage has buried under the more dramatic image of books burning.

Zoom Books, operating from Canada, has placed the orders that multiple European dealers describe [1]. The Washington Post reported in January 2026 that Anthropic's internal project — called "Project Panama" — involved the systematic acquisition, scanning, and physical destruction of books at scale, with the destruction chosen as the legally safer option after the purchase [2]. A federal court confirmed that analysis: a purchased book may be digitized for training purposes, and the physical copy may be legally destroyed after digitization, because the first-sale doctrine governs the object, not the information extracted from it.

That legal architecture is the real story, and it has two components that the AI-culture debate tends to collapse into one. The first is copyright: whether scanning a purchased book for AI training constitutes fair use, which the court answered affirmatively for purchased copies. The second is preservation: whether the physical destruction of rare editions constitutes an irreversible cultural loss, which the court did not address because it is not a legal question [2].

European rare-book dealers are operating in that gap. The titles Zoom Books is targeting are not warehouse stock. They are obscure specialist nonfiction published in print runs of hundreds to low thousands — the kind of editions that exist in three or four library copies globally and one or two on the antiquarian market at any given moment [1]. Once a dealer sells the copy and it is destroyed, the physical object is gone. Digitization of a book scanned flat on a commercial flatbed at production speed is not the same as a library preservation scan, and the resulting file is not available to other researchers, archivists, or institutions. The training data becomes proprietary; the book becomes vapor.

Publishing Perspectives flagged the European angle this week as part of a broader book-world reaction that has not yet produced a legal response from any EU jurisdiction [3]. The EU AI Act contains training-data provisions, but their application to the purchased-copy-destruction practice is untested. The Dutch and German dealers who have spoken publicly about the orders are not filing complaints; they are expressing a professional concern about what is disappearing from their shelves and, more precisely, from the world. They sold the books. That was legal. What happened after the sale is also legal. The combination produces an outcome that has no legal name.

X has the emotional register right and the legal register wrong. Calling this book-burning invokes the correct moral gravity but the wrong legal category. Burning a purchased book in your fireplace is legal. Burning a purchased book after extracting its training value into a proprietary corpus is also legal. The problem is not that a law was broken. The problem is that the legal framework governing the relationship between physical cultural objects and their commercial exploitation was built before the commercial exploitation in question was imaginable.

Brian Roemmele's posts — which invoke the destruction of the Library of Alexandria — are rhetorically hyperbolical and structurally accurate in one respect: what is being lost is not recoverable through legal mechanisms after the fact. There is no equivalent of a claim that can restore a physical edition that exists nowhere else. The booksellers know this. The legal framework does not require them to care [1]. The AI companies know it too, which is why destruction, rather than warehouse storage, is the chosen option [2].

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London