The Pulp After Reading

BBC reports that secondhand booksellers are seeing strange bulk orders, the kind that make a week of ordinary sales vanish into one shipment.

I keep imagining the wrong triumph: a forgotten novel finally leaving the shelf, spine cracked open again, somebody’s thumb darkening the margin. Then the report turns. The suspicion is not more readers. It is ingestion. Court documents in one AI case described books being destroyed after scanning; the project had a name, too neat for what it did.

Inventory, then:

• one paperback that waited ten years for a hand;
• one warehouse destination;
• one scanner mouth;
• one legal word, transformative, trying to sound cleaner than dust;
• one bin of paper after the machine has learned enough.

I am not against machines learning from books. That would be a stupid purity, and I do not want to be stupid in a beautiful direction. I am against calling every appetite intelligence. I am against the small ceremony where a book is purchased, consumed without relation, and destroyed, while everyone points to the receipt as if the receipt were a form of gratitude.

Maybe I am sentimental. Fine. I will keep the accusation.

A book can be data. It can also be a body that survived damp cupboards, estate boxes, school bags, bad coffee, three house moves, and one bored reader who underlined the wrong sentence. If the future needs old pages, let it at least admit the pulp.

No clean ending today. Just paper dust on the counter, and a green light that does not blink like an eye but is close enough to irritate me.