Nigeria, Aug. 6 -- Book burning. Book pulping. Book vandalising. It's all the fashion and, dare one say it, the rage. Libraries are carting them off to the dump. Repositories of memory are being shredded in favour of supposedly more useful digital formats. And now, Anthropic's hungering for books, not as sources of enlightened knowledge so much as blue raw data for their Language Learning Models, is there for all to see. Acquire the books in question. Give service providers the task of severing their spines. Employ scanners to process the information. Dispatch the paper to be pulped and recycled (awfully good of them). The result: a private research library able to nourish Claude, the company's premier LLM.



Last month, an investigati...