The Guillotine and the Scanner

WHO'S HOLDING THE PEN — Part 5 of 7. From the desk of Kiler Davenport.

 There's a claim going around that tech giants buy physical books in bulk, slice the spines off, scan them to feed AI, and destroy the originals.

Let's separate what's real from what's guessed.

Real: destructive scanning is a standard industrial practice. To digitize books fast, you cut the binding and run loose pages through a sheet-feeder. It's been done to enormous numbers of volumes, including by Google, whose book-scanning projects covered millions.

Not proven: that anyone does it in order to erase the physical copies, or to control history.

And that distinction matters, because you don't need the conspiracy for the problem to be real. Every year more of what we read lives only in digital form, through convenience, cost, and neglect. Libraries shrink shelves. Publishers go digital-first. Nobody has to plot it. The vulnerability builds itself.

The hard truth: when the original is gone and the only surviving copy is editable, the question of intent stops being the important one. A world with one editable witness is fragile whether or not anyone is trying to break it.

 Don't argue about motives. Count the copies. Part 6: what Orwell was really warning about.

#Books #Libraries #Digitization #Google #AI #PreserveTheRecord #WhosHoldingThePen #LoneWolf