ast month, a group of citizens in Ahmedabad gathered to read books by Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai and Holocaust survivor Anne Frank. This was their way of protesting against the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad for forcing a private school to drop books by Yousafzai and Frank from its compulsory reading list. Soon, members of the
, so that AI companies would not have to deal with the headache of copyright and e-books.
Why are these two different groups targeting books? The Bajrang Dal said it disapproved of Yousafzai’s perceived views on India and Kashmir. Here, there is a clear ideological opposition to Yousafzai’s ideas. The organisation carried out the deliberate act of thrashing people and tearing up books to send a clear warning: do not read this book; and if you do, face our wrath.
In the AI case, there is no such ideological opposition. The book is seen by companies as a mere object that contains ideas. And those ideas are not dangerous; on the contrary, they are important because they can be mined for profit. The more the knowledge fed into LLMs, the greater their capacity to respond, and the more dependent we become on them. What makes this even more worrying is that not all such extraction and destruction is seen as damaging to our cultural spaces or as insults to creators. Not too long ago, a U.S. court ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI was not, in itself, copyright infringement. “One replaced the other,” one of the judges wrote. “There is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”
This means that within the framework of our current understanding of “fair use”, a company can buy books written by human beings, copy their contents into a machine, and then destroy the books without even having to compensate the writers. Surely, we need to ask ourselves: have we understood the words “fair” and “use” too narrowly?
Why books matter
This practice unsurprisingly sparked widespread anger, which brings us to a more fundamental question: what does the physical book mean to us?
When a book is given to a child, it can become a precious possession, a way to travel into different worlds of imagination. A book given as a gift by a friend can become a warm memory. A book borrowed from a library for research can be carried around as a vessel of knowledge. A book purchased from a rare-books shop can be as precious as silver, containing layers of history. Books, therefore, have always been more than paper and ink and a spine. They are, of course, textual instruments, but they are also cultural objects — repositories of our thoughts, wanderings, dealings, and feelings. If ideas are what makes us human, books, then, are a physical manifestation of those ideas, which we choose to preserve and pass on.
In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden writes about how, when the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina came under artillery fire from the Serbian military in 1992, librarians formed a human chain to protect books. In Nazi Germany, a group of Jewish intellectuals, known as the ‘Paper Brigade’, risked execution by hiding books inside their clothing. In the Soviet Union, Samizdat involved clandestinely copying and circulating censored texts, while the modern copyleft movement allows creators to choose to reproduce and share their work freely.
Today, in a world where books are seen either as dangerous or as useful raw material — rather than as things to be read — the ways in which we defend books may have to keep evolving.
