AI firms are buying up old books because they are the last slop-free data left
THE SO WHAT
Labs quietly slicing spines off millions of books via brokers like ISBNdb is a clear tell that high-quality, non-slop text is now a scarce strategic asset. If you own clean, rights-clear corpora—technical manuals, domain literature, proprietary docs—treat them as monetizable IP and negotiate access, not giveaways.
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