Meredith Martin Quoted in The New Yorker on AI and Book Scanning

Meredith Martin, Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities, is quoted in “Destroying Books to Build a Mind,” a September 8 article in The New Yorker by Francesca Mancino. The article examines Anthropic’s effort, revealed in court filings, to buy print books in bulk, cut them apart, and scan them for use as AI training data.

Martin offered context on how digitization works in practice. Removing book bindings to make scanning easier is common in university preservation work. Scanning a book without damaging it costs more, she noted, but it’s entirely possible to “take images that preserve the integrity of the book without flattening it.” She also pointed out that libraries discard old books all the time as part of routine collection culling. Since the books being bought for this purpose are likely not very rare, she argued, cutting them apart for scanning shouldn’t be seen as inflammatory.

Read the full article in The New Yorker.