Frank Landymore writes: “Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading and looking nice on a shelf. But artificial intelligence (AI) companies are interested in neither. To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Antique books may be endangered. Rare booksellers in the Netherlands are being inundated with bulk purchases they believe are being made by AI companies, though they can’t know for sure.”