The Book Was Never the Problem, The Spec Was
Written by Monserrat Menendez, Interior Designer
Monserrat is an entrepreneur, interior architect, and sustainability advocate, as well as the founder of Senom Design, a firm dedicated to merging innovative design with sustainable solutions. With over a decade of experience across residential, commercial, and international projects, she specializes in bringing clients’ visions to life through thoughtful, high-impact interiors.
I specify materials for a living, not in the abstract. I sit with a client, pull samples, and decide what the room will be made of. Which stone, which fiber, which finish, adhesive, or coating, and increasingly, what happens to all of it in thirty years when someone decides the kitchen looks dated. I’ve also sat in projects where something perfectly functional was being removed for no reason other than that someone wanted something new. It was not damaged, unsafe, or obsolete. It was just no longer wanted.
That is where sustainability gets uncomfortable for me. We can specify the replacement beautifully, choose the responsible material, document the recycled content, and calculate the diversion rate. But none of that answers the first question: Did this need to become waste at all?
So when I saw the photograph of a warehouse filled with secondhand books waiting to be fed into an industrial guillotine so an artificial intelligence (AI) company could scan them, I wasn’t thinking about literature. I was thinking: nobody specified the end of life.
What actually happened
In early 2024, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, began buying used books on an industrial scale. An internal document described the goal as an effort to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” Books were purchased in bulk from used sellers, including Better World Books and World of Books. The process was simple.
"Cut the spine. Scan the loose pages. Recycle the paper."
A federal judge later found Anthropic’s use of legally purchased books for AI training to be fair use, distinguishing that process from the company’s separate use of pirated copies. In the purchased book workflow, the physical book was destroyed after digitization rather than preserved alongside a digital replacement.
Legal, recycled, and found to be fair use by a federal judge. Still troubling, for a reason I can explain with a spec sheet.
We have been recycling the wrong thing
"Reduce, reuse, recycle is not a slogan."
It is a hierarchy. The order is the entire point. Reuse preserves the resources already invested in an object, including the raw material, manufacturing, printing, binding, transportation, and labor. Recycling recovers part of the material while sacrificing much of that accumulated value.
A readable book turned into pulp is not automatically a sustainability success story. The material may survive. The object does not.
I watch versions of this happening in my industry constantly. Something perfectly usable is removed because someone wants something different. Then we focus enormous attention on making the disposal responsible.
We demolish a sound building. Divert the concrete and steel. Report the diversion rate. Take the sustainability credit.
The number is beautiful. But the better question – could we have adapted what was already there? Often never makes it onto the schedule.
Same logic. Smaller object. That is what changed my relationship with the word recycled. I stopped accepting it as an automatic synonym for sustainability.
Sometimes recycling is absolutely the responsible answer. But sometimes it is simply the responsible answer to a waste problem we unnecessarily created. Recycling is not absolution. It is the last resort we keep treating as the first.
When a book becomes the last copy
I’m not precious about every object. I’m a designer. I replace things for a living. What bothers me is mass destruction without a second question.
A book has already been made. The tree was harvested, the paper manufactured, the pages printed, bound, shipped, bought, and read, maybe more than once.
If you’ve already acquired it and extracted what you needed from it, why is destruction the default next step? Repurpose it. Donate it. Resell it. Circulate it. Before destroying anything on an industrial scale, know what you’re destroying.
Reporting on the book buying pipeline suggests purchases can happen by the pallet, where volume matters more than the individual title. One bookseller told 404 Media that bulk purchases had included out-of-print books for which very few copies appeared to remain.
He also said the sales cleared dead inventory and helped his business financially. Both can be true. That’s what makes this a supply chain problem, not a villain problem. Then there is the irony.
Books printed before widespread generative AI have reportedly become especially desirable because they offer something increasingly valuable: text written before AI-generated material began flooding the information ecosystem. Uncontaminated human writing.
The pipeline assigns additional value to human writing because it represents a finite source of uncontaminated material, and then consumes the physical source to obtain it. Efficiency does not resolve that contradiction.
No, the answer is not “go digital”
Every time paper gets destroyed, someone concludes that paper was the problem. Dematerialize. Put it on a screen. Save a tree.
Except a digital file is not immaterial. It lives on servers, in cooled buildings, drawing electricity and water. The models being trained on these pages require substantial computational infrastructure.
Trading a paperback for a server is not automatically a sustainability win. It is a different material and energy equation.
I have spent years arguing that sustainability is not subtraction. It is designing the same human experiences with better materials, better systems, and a plan for what happens next.
So let’s talk about the actual spec. The paperback is not inherently unsustainable. A paperback made from virgin fiber, coatings that are difficult to recover, conventional inks, and incompatible laminates or adhesives can be.
Alternatives already exist
Fiber: Agricultural residues such as wheat straw and bagasse can supplement conventional wood pulp. Recycled fiber and alternative crops such as hemp can reduce dependence on virgin forest fiber where appropriate.
Ink: Vegetable-based and algae-based formulations can reduce reliance on conventional petroleum-based inks, while ink chemistry can also be evaluated for deinking and recovery.
Coating: Use uncoated stock where possible, or coatings designed with fiber recovery in mind.
Binding: Specify adhesives and binding systems for repulpability and material recovery. A line on a specification can determine whether materials separate cleanly years later.
None of this is futuristic. These are procurement decisions. Publishers have rarely been pressured to make them visible because almost nobody buys a book based on its material specification.
Maybe we should. I specify wallcovering with its end of life in mind. Why would I hold a book to a lower standard than a curtain?
The manifesto part
If a book is going to end its life as pulp, design it so the fiber can return to the highest value cycle possible.
If a book is rare, check before you cut. Cross-reference holdings. Flag scarce editions. Last copies do not go to the guillotine.
That is a database query, not a moral dilemma. If the object has cultural or material value, scan it without destroying it. Archives already use nondestructive digitization when preserving the original matters. It is slower and costs more.
That is what an externality feels like when you finally pay for it
If destruction isn’t necessary, don’t destroy it. Donate it. Resell it. Circulate it. The argument is not that every book must survive forever. The problem is designing a process where destruction happens automatically, at scale, because nobody specified another ending.
If the process is defensible, publish the numbers. Volumes purchased. Volumes destroyed. Rarity flags. Fiber recovery. Final destinations.
Transparency belongs in the specification too. The law asked whether the company’s copying qualified as fair use. That was the right question for a copyright case.
It is not the only question worth asking. Compliance is a floor. I’ve never seen a floor mistaken for a ceiling and had it end well – not in my projects, not in my industry, and not here.
A warehouse full of books waiting to be cut isn’t really a story about technology being cruel to literature. It is a story about something much more familiar.
We have become extremely sophisticated at specifying what comes next while remaining remarkably careless about what happens to what came before.
The book was never the problem. The spec was.
Read more from Monserrat Menendez
Monserrat Menendez, Interior Designer
Monserrat is an entrepreneur, interior architect, and sustainability advocate, as well as the founder of Senom Design, a firm dedicated to merging innovative design with sustainable solutions. With over a decade of experience across residential, commercial, and international projects, she specializes in bringing clients’ visions to life through thoughtful, high-impact interiors. She is the U.S. Brand Ambassador for U Green, an organization that helps companies become more profitable while empowering people and brands to follow a consistent path toward sustainability through transformative education and specialized consulting. As an Executive Contributor to Brainz Magazine, she shares her expertise in design, sustainability, and innovation. Her mission is to create spaces that are not only beautiful but also responsible and forward-thinking.
