When AI Turns Books Into Data: What the Destruction of Physical Books Could Mean for India

AI is transforming books into training data but what happens when physical books disappear? Explore the impact on India, cultural heritage, Nalanda, children's reading, cognition, and the future of human knowledge.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why AI companies are increasingly interested in physical books

• What destructive book scanning means

• Why destroying books after scanning raises cultural concerns

AUG 5, 2026

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A book can survive a century. It can pass through several hands, sit on a library shelf, travel across borders, survive political upheaval, and eventually reach a child who discovers an idea inside it that changes the direction of their life. A machine does not see a book that way. To an artificial-intelligence system, a book can become something else: data. And that distinction is becoming increasingly important.

In 2026, reports and investigations have brought renewed attention to AI companies and intermediaries acquiring large quantities of physical books, scanning them, and in some cases cutting apart and destroying the original copies after digitisation. The reason is straightforward: high-quality books contain something AI developers desperately need—large volumes of structured, human-written material. This is not a story about being “anti-AI.”

AI is one of the most consequential technologies of our time. The real question is much more uncomfortable: What happens when the world's accumulated knowledge becomes raw material for machines, while the physical objects that carried that knowledge disappear? For India, that question is not merely technological. It is historical. Because India knows what it means to lose libraries. And we should therefore be extremely careful about creating a future in which knowledge is preserved only inside machines controlled by someone else.

Why Do AI Companies Need Books?

Large language models learn from enormous quantities of text. The quality of that text matters. The internet contains billions of pages, but much of the modern web is repetitive, poorly edited, automatically generated, duplicated, commercial, or increasingly contaminated by AI-generated material. Books offer something different. They are usually:

• Longer

• Edited

• Structured

• Written for sustained reading

• Rich in vocabulary

• Full of specialised knowledge

• Written across generations

• Available across subjects and cultures

This makes books extremely valuable as training material. Recent reporting indicates that AI-related demand has contributed to unusual bulk purchases of physical books, including obscure and rare titles. Some investigations have traced books to facilities where bindings were removed, pages were scanned, and physical copies were subsequently discarded. That creates a disturbing transformation. A book that once existed to be read by humans can become a temporary container for information that will ultimately be consumed by machines.

What Is Destructive Book Scanning?

The idea itself isn't new. Libraries and archives have been digitising books for decades. But there is an important difference between preserving a book digitally and destroying the physical book to digitise it. Destructive scanning typically involves:

1. Removing the book's binding.

2. Separating its pages.

3. Feeding individual pages through high-speed scanners.

4. Using optical character recognition (OCR) to convert images into machine-readable text.

5. Storing the resulting digital material.

6. Discarding or recycling the physical book.

The advantage is speed. A bound book has to be carefully photographed page by page. A disassembled book can be processed much faster. The problem is obvious. Once the original is destroyed, there is no physical original left. The Internet Archive, by contrast, has described its digitisation process as non-destructive, preserving the original physical book while creating a digital copy. That distinction should be at the centre of this debate. The issue isn't digitisation. The issue is whether preservation requires destruction.

The Most Important Question: Why Destroy What Can Be Preserved?

Technology gives us extraordinary possibilities. We can scan books without cutting them apart. We can photograph pages. We can create high-resolution digital archives. We can preserve metadata. We can maintain multiple copies. We can store knowledge in libraries, universities, national archives and public repositories. So if a book is rare, historically significant, locally published or difficult to replace, destroying it to obtain its text should raise a serious cultural question.

Efficiency is not the same thing as wisdom. A machine may value the information. A civilisation must also value the object carrying the information. That distinction matters enormously in India.

India Has Seen What Happens When Libraries Are Lost

Few examples are as powerful as Nalanda. Nalanda Mahavihara in present-day Bihar was one of the great centres of learning in the ancient world. It attracted scholars from across Asia and maintained extensive manuscript collections. Historical accounts describe a major library complex associated with Nalanda, including buildings known as Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka. The destruction of Nalanda is often reduced to one sentence: “The library was burned.” But what was actually lost was far greater than paper. Manuscripts represented accumulated work:

• Philosophy

• Logic

• Grammar

• Medicine

• Astronomy

• Mathematics

• Religious thought

• Linguistics

• Commentaries

• Debates

• Generations of scholarship

Some historical details surrounding Nalanda's final destruction remain debated, including the precise circumstances and chronology of the attacks. Historians also point out that the institution had already experienced decline and changing patterns of royal patronage. But the larger historical lesson remains undeniable: When knowledge repositories disappear, the loss cannot always be reconstructed. A civilisation may remember that a book existed. It may even know its title. But that doesn't mean it can recover the actual text. And that is why India's relationship with physical books should be treated differently from the relationship between a corporation and a dataset.

The Nalanda Analogy Is Powerful, But It Must Be Used Carefully

There is an important difference between the burning of a historical library and modern AI scanning. One involves destruction through violence and conflict. The other involves technological digitisation and commercial activity. They are not the same event. But there is a meaningful parallel:

Both raise the question of what happens when the physical containers of knowledge disappear. At Nalanda, manuscripts were destroyed before modern digital preservation existed. Today, humanity possesses the technology to preserve information in multiple formats. That makes our responsibility greater, not smaller.

We now have fewer excuses for allowing unique physical knowledge to disappear unnecessarily.

When Knowledge Becomes Data

This is where the AI debate becomes much bigger than books. A physical book has context. It has an author. An edition. A publication date. Annotations. Margins. Ownership history. Paper. Binding. Illustrations. Sometimes signatures. Sometimes handwritten notes from previous readers. Sometimes it is itself a historical artefact. When you convert it into a text file, much of that physical context disappears. The machine sees: tokens. The human sees: a book. That difference is profound. Imagine an old Sanskrit text printed in Varanasi in the early twentieth century.

A researcher might care about the edition, translator, commentary, annotations and provenance. A language model may primarily care about the textual patterns. Both have value. But they are not the same value.

Why This Matters Even More for India

India isn't simply a country that produces English-language books. It possesses an enormous linguistic and literary ecosystem. Hindi. Tamil. Bengali. Marathi. Malayalam.Kannada. Telugu. Gujarati. Punjabi. Odia. Assamese. Sanskrit. Urdu. And many other languages and regional traditions. There are also oral traditions, local histories, religious literature, folk literature, manuscripts and community archives.

Much of this material is less commercially attractive than English-language publishing. That creates a potential danger. What if the most valuable Indian knowledge becomes the knowledge that AI companies decide is worth digitising? That could create an invisible hierarchy of preservation. Popular material gets digitised. Rare regional material gets ignored. Commercially useful languages receive investment. Smaller languages remain poorly represented. And knowledge that was once physically accessible to local communities becomes increasingly dependent on digital systems. India should not allow its cultural memory to become an accidental by-product of somebody else's AI strategy.

The Bigger Risk: Who Controls the Digital Version?

Suppose a rare collection is digitised. The physical copies disappear. The digital material is then stored on private servers. Who controls access? Who decides what can be searched? Who determines what an AI system is allowed to reproduce? Who owns the metadata? Who gets to train future models on it? Who decides whether an old Indian manuscript is culturally sensitive? These are not hypothetical philosophical questions.

They are questions about digital sovereignty. A civilisation that loses physical books but gains digital copies hasn't necessarily lost everything. But if access to those digital copies becomes concentrated in a handful of private systems, another problem emerges. Knowledge can survive and still become inaccessible. That is a different kind of loss.

Copyright Is Only One Part of the Problem

Much of the current AI-book debate is understandably focused on copyright. And that debate is important. In India, the legal situation is evolving rapidly. In July 2026, the Delhi High Court issued an important interim ruling concerning whether copyrighted works can be used for AI training under India's fair-dealing framework; the ruling is subject to appeal and has generated significant legal debate.

But copyright doesn't answer every question. Something can potentially be legally permissible and still deserve ethical scrutiny. Consider a rare book. The copyright may have expired. The book may be legally purchased. The scanning process may comply with applicable law. But if that copy is one of only a handful remaining, should it automatically be treated as disposable? Legal permission and cultural responsibility are not always identical. India should understand that distinction clearly.

And Then There Is the Child Sitting in Front of the Screen

This is where the issue becomes even more serious. Because the future of books isn't only about preserving old knowledge. It's about preserving the human ability to engage with knowledge deeply. Children are growing up in an environment where information is increasingly:

• Short

• Instant

• Searchable

• Personalised

• Algorithmically recommended

• AI-generated

• Continuously interrupted

That environment has enormous benefits. But it also creates risks. And we should not casually assume that replacing books with screens is cognitively neutral.

Does Reading on Paper Actually Matter for Children?

The scientific answer requires nuance. It would be wrong to say: “Screens destroy children's brains.” There is no credible basis for such a simplistic claim. Digital reading can be useful. It can improve accessibility. It can provide narration, dictionaries, translation and interactive features. It can support children with particular learning needs.

A 2024 systematic review of 88 studies examining children and adolescents found that results varied considerably. Across reading comprehension studies, the most common finding was no significant difference, followed by a meaningful group of studies favouring print. Print advantages appeared more often for informational texts and older children.

Another meta-analysis involving 39 studies and 1,812 children found that when digital and paper books were otherwise similar, children tended to show lower comprehension with digital books, although enhanced digital features and adult support could change outcomes. So the scientifically responsible conclusion is not: “Digital reading is bad.” It is: The medium matters under some conditions, and print remains an important tool for deep reading and comprehension. That is a very different claim.

What Could Happen to Children's Cognitive Systems?

This needs to be discussed carefully. There is no evidence that simply reading an ebook automatically damages a child's brain. The bigger concern is how children consume information. A physical book generally provides fewer interruptions. There is no notification. No recommendation engine. No pop-up. No autoplay. No comment section. No advertisement competing for attention.

The child can remain with one narrative or argument for a sustained period. That supports the practice of sustained attention. And sustained attention is valuable. A child who regularly reads long-form material has repeated opportunities to:

• Follow complex ideas

• Remember earlier information

• Build vocabulary

• Infer meaning

• Visualise scenes

• Understand chronology

• Make connections

• Tolerate slower rewards

• Develop independent interpretation

These abilities don't belong exclusively to paper. But the distraction-free nature of print can make them easier to practise. Research comparing paper and screen reading has found evidence that screen reading can sometimes involve shallower processing and poorer comprehension, although results depend on context and reader characteristics. The danger, therefore, isn't that a child touches a tablet. The danger is creating a generation that becomes accustomed to information without sustained attention.

AI Could Make This Problem Bigger

Imagine a child asks: “Explain photosynthesis.” An AI gives the answer in three seconds. The child understands the basic idea. Useful. Now imagine the child is assigned a 20-page chapter about ecosystems. Instead of reading it, the child asks AI: “Summarise this.” Then: “Give me the answers. Then: “Write my homework.” The child has obtained the information. But did the child practise the cognitive work required to obtain it? That's the question.

Information retrieval is not the same as learning. A machine can give you an answer without giving you the experience of thinking your way toward that answer. That distinction will become increasingly important in education.

The Danger of Outsourcing Thinking

Human cognition develops through use. Children learn to reason by reasoning. They learn to write by writing. They learn vocabulary by encountering language repeatedly. They learn patience by staying with difficult tasks. They learn judgement by making decisions. If AI becomes the automatic answer to every difficult cognitive task, children may become extremely efficient at accessing answers without developing equivalent depth in producing them independently.

This is not an argument for banning AI. It is an argument for protecting the activities AI should not replace. Reading should be one of them. Writing should be one of them. Memorisation should be one of them. Mental arithmetic should have a place. Discussion should have a place. Debate should have a place. Silence should have a place. And yes— physical books should have a place.

India Should Be Especially Careful

India is simultaneously becoming a major AI market and a civilisation with an extraordinary textual heritage. That creates an unusual responsibility. India should not choose between: AI or books. That's a false choice. India needs: AI + books. Digital archives + physical archives. Innovation + preservation. Technology + human literacy. Machine intelligence + human judgement. We should build AI systems that can learn from knowledge without requiring the unnecessary destruction of the objects carrying that knowledge. And we should invest in national and regional digitisation projects where the original physical copy remains protected.

What India Should Do Now

The response doesn't need to be dramatic. It needs to be strategic.

1. Preserve significant physical collections: Libraries should identify rare and culturally significant books and manuscripts that should never be treated as disposable scanning material.

2. Expand non-destructive digitisation: India should invest in high-quality scanning infrastructure that preserves originals.

3. Build Indian-language digital archives: The country's linguistic diversity should be treated as an AI and cultural asset not an obstacle.

4. Keep multiple copies: Digital preservation should never depend on a single company or server.

5. Teach children to read deeply: Schools should maintain substantial print-reading programmes alongside digital education.

6. Teach AI literacy: Children should understand that AI produces answers, not truth. They need to question sources, verify claims and think independently.

7. Protect public access: Knowledge belonging to India's cultural heritage should not become inaccessible simply because it has been digitised.

8. Create clear rules for AI training: India needs a serious framework balancing innovation, copyright, authors' rights, cultural preservation and public interest.

The Machine Should Learn From Humanity ,Not Erase the Evidence of Humanity

This is ultimately the heart of the issue. AI needs data. Fine. AI needs books. Fine. AI needs human knowledge. Of course. But we should reject the idea that knowledge becomes disposable once a machine has extracted it. A book is not merely the words inside it. It is a physical record of human civilisation. A library is not merely a database. It is a cultural institution. A child reading a book is not merely downloading information.

The child is practising a uniquely human activity: sitting with another person's thoughts long enough to understand them. India has already lived through periods in which knowledge repositories were destroyed. We should not romanticise that history, exaggerate disputed details, or pretend modern AI is equivalent to historical violence. But we should learn from the underlying lesson. Knowledge that disappears is knowledge that may never be fully recovered. Today we possess technology powerful enough to preserve almost everything. That means we have a responsibility to use it wisely. AI should help humanity preserve its memory. It should not become a reason to throw that memory away. And when it comes to children, the responsibility becomes even clearer.

Give them AI. Teach them how to use it. Teach them how to question it. But also give them books. Let them read without notifications. Let them struggle through difficult paragraphs. Let them turn pages. Let them underline sentences. Let them remember ideas without asking a machine to remember for them. Because the greatest danger isn't that machines will know more than us. The greater danger is that we stop exercising the mental abilities that made knowledge possible in the first place.

Key Takeaways

• AI companies increasingly need large quantities of high-quality human-written material for training.

• Recent investigations have reported physical books being purchased, destructively scanned and discarded in some AI-related data-gathering operations.

• Digitisation and destruction are not the same thing; books can be preserved through non-destructive scanning.

• India's history demonstrates the enormous cultural cost that can accompany the loss of major knowledge repositories.

• Nalanda's destruction is historically complex, and some details surrounding the final attacks remain debated, but its loss remains an important example of knowledge vulnerability.

• Physical books remain valuable even in a digital world because they preserve cultural, historical and material context

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Editorial Review Process

Research-based content reviewed for accuracy, source verification, readability, originality, and SEO before publication.

Last Updated: June 2026

Fact Checked: Yes

Content Type: Informational / Educational
Review Focus: Artificial intelligence, book digitisation, copyright and AI training, Indian intellectual heritage, Nalanda history, children's reading research, cognitive development, and source verification.

References

• The Indian Express — Why AI Companies Are Cutting Up Books to Train AI Models

• India Today — Knowledge Theft? AI Companies Buying and Destroying Books After Scanning

• Indian Express — AI Training and Copyright Law in India

• Nalanda — The Treasury of Lives

• INFLIBNET — History of Academic Libraries in India

• Hare et al. — Children's Reading Outcomes in Digital and Print Mediums: A Systematic Review

• Furenes, Kucirkova & Bus — A Comparison of Children's Reading on Paper Versus Screen: A Meta-Analysis

Disclaimer

This article is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not claim that AI technology inherently damages children's brains or that digital reading is universally inferior to print. Research on digital versus print reading is nuanced and depends on age, task, content, platform design and individual circumstances. Historical accounts concerning the destruction of Nalanda also contain areas of scholarly debate, which have been acknowledged in this article. Readers should consult original research and qualified experts when making educational or policy decisions.

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Readolve creates practical, evidence-informed educational resources focused on health, wellness, personal development, parenting, and lifelong learning.

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
— Often attributed to Cicero