Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage
ISBNdb, a book database company, has stopped offering a service to source printed books for AI training after 404 Media reported on the practice. The company claimed the service was only a test of market interest and has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book for AI training. ISBNdb has removed the related landing page from its website and emphasized its main focus is on providing book metadata.
- ▪ISBNdb claimed to source printed books for AI companies to use as training data, but has since walked back this claim.
- ▪The company removed a landing page for the service after 404 Media reported on it, stating it was only a test of market interest.
- ▪ISBNdb has emphasized that its main service is providing book metadata, not sourcing or selling physical books.
404 Media files mainly under tech. We currently carry 61 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/ai-company-training-scanning-books-database-isbndb/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:04:26 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T14:23:02.758Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T14:23:02.758Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wE-01JpoLBSC · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test of market interest.” On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its news page about the change. “We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else,” ISBNdb wrote. “We don't train AI models, and we never have.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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