They didn't burn the books. They fed them to a scanner and called it fair use. Somewhere in a warehouse, a hydraulic press is guillotining the spine off a 1962 first edition. A scanner eats the loose pages. What's left goes to recycling. This isn't a dystopian short story — it's Anthropic's actual training pipeline, and it had a code name: Project Panama. The internal memo was blunt: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world... we don't want it to be known that we are working on this." A judge looked at millions of shredded books and said: perfectly legal. Why? Because the physical copy died the moment the digital one was born — one copy in, one copy out, no duplication, no distribution. Fair use, case closed. So now there's a quiet industry of it — bulk buyers, anonymous orders, rare pre-2022 editions getting scooped up specifically *because* they're scarce and untrained-on. Books that survived library purges, fires, and a couple hundred years of neglect are meeting their end in a sheet-feed scanner in an industrial park. Preservation or incineration? Depends whether you think the text is the book, or the book is the book.