Comment Editor Nicole Pontes Coelho explores how, even though physical media has become increasingly popular, industries such as digital publishing, AI and video games have shifted towards a digital-only distribution, and what this means in terms of ownership rights

By Nicole Pontes-Coelho | Sep 10 2026

In a world where technology improves at an exponential rate, Gen Z has decided to go in the opposite direction, rejecting digital media and returning to analogue formats. Many have recently taken to social media to defend the use of physical media as a way to push back against the ongoing industry shift toward digital-only distribution.

The switch to digital-only distribution is believed to have begun with the rise of streaming services as well as with news organisations and publishing houses moving to digital-first models in the late 1990’s early 2000’s. Nevertheless, this shift has recently accelerated with the mass adoption of e-books, the rise of AI, as well as video game companies’ decision to begin to cease physical game disc production.

Even though e-books have many benefits, younger generations are straying away from them. Although they allow you to carry an entire library in one lightweight device and save money, as e-books cost a fraction of the price of print books, there are major flaws.

The first being that you do not truly own an e-book. When you purchase an e-book, you are usually only buying a temporary licence to read it, which means that platforms can remove or alter e-book content in your digital library at any time and without your permission if they lose publishing rights. Another issue is that companies use Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to stop users from copying, sharing or moving e-books to other devices. These are a few of the reasons why many people prefer print books, as they not only belong to you permanently, but also because you can lend or sell them without corporate interference.

Traditional books have also remained the most popular format for reading, as younger generations have shown a strong preference for physical books, seeing it as a way to clap back at AI. By purchasing physical books, not only are you directly supporting human authors, illustrators and publishers, but you are also directly fighting against the recent tech companies' destruction of books.

At the beginning of the year, documents from a Northern California court case revealed Anthropic (an AI company’s) efforts to improve their large language model, Claude. The court documents exposed Project Panama, which consists of buying a large amount of books, including rare and antique editions, cutting their spine, feeding them into high-speed scanners and then shredding them.

Project Panama, also referred to as destructive scanning, was the company’s solution to their “need” to procure a large-scale, high-quality dataset that had been created before 2022, that is, before the influence of generative AI. Anthropic believed that the “well-curated facts, well-organised analyses, and captivating fictional narratives” from books would help “Claude write as accurately and as compellingly” as human authors.

Destructive scanning was not Anthropic’s first choice. Initially, the AI company thought about securing copyright permission to use existing e-books, but argued that would require a long and hard legal, practice and business process. It then decided to use pirated sources, but that ended with a $1.5 billion out-of-court settlement with authors.

Contrary to Anthropic’s other options, destructive scanning is not an infringement of copyright, as according to the court, training a corporate product is equivalent to teaching a human how to read in order to learn how to write. This process is also legal because, in accordance with the First-Sale Doctrine of the Copyright Act, a buyer of a physical book has the right to destroy it if they so please. Additionally, the AI company is using physical ownership as a legal loophole to manufacture digitised datasets without compensating authors.

Court documents unsealed during the case also divulged that the company planned to scan between 500,000 and 2 million books over a 6-month vendor contract. Nevertheless, internal documents revealed that the company intended to “destructively scan all the books in the world". 

This seems like a distant reality reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451; however, this is currently happening and much closer to home than you might expect.

Last May, Galway-based Kennys Bookshop received an order for 5 thousand books, which the store’s operators suspect is destined for these AI programs. Bookseller Tomás Kenny said that it is not unusual for the store to receive one-off orders of this amount to supply libraries. Orders such as these usually come from third parties, with the identity of the buyer not being disclosed. Therefore, Mr Kenny had first assumed that this order was of that nature. Nonetheless, when he began gathering the order, it became more unusual, as it was “scattergun” and focused on “obviously out of date”, “unusual” and “poor quality” books. Mr Kenny’s suspicion grew when he heard from other booksellers in Europe, namely from Sweden and Germany, who had had similar orders.

“Previously when we had a large book order, bulk purchases like this, it might be for a library in Japan that’s setting a university and a new English language library for example,” said Mr Kenny. “So it would be very obvious but to hear the same story in three different languages, and we suspect that there are more in other EU countries, leads us to believe it’s very suspicious".

Books aren’t the only form of physical media “under attack”, with physical discs for video games also being put into jeopardy.

In July, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that it will stop producing physical game discs for all new PlayStation games in January 2028. The company argued that this decision follows consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry shift away from physical media.

At the same time Sony made this announcement, they also sent an email to PlayStation owners reminding them about the platform’s Terms of Service regarding digital purchases. “The software is licensed to you, not sold,” the email states. “You are granted a limited non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal licence to play".

This has been badly received by the gaming community, as Sony has not only shown their intent to remove physical discs and cartridges, but also reminded players that they do not own any of their digital games, and that, therefore, the company can alter, censor or remove content at any time without their consent. This loss of ownership control also means that Sony will have full monopoly on pricing, as without the physical copies of the games there cannot be a physical retailer or a secondhand market. Gamers believe that without physical stores competing for sales, it will lead to an increase in pricing.

In response, the gaming community has urged PlayStation 5 owners to log off from their consoles, not play any games or download any new titles during the last week of August. With this boycott, gamers are hoping to force Sony to reconsider their decision and to continue producing physical copies of games.

Now only time will tell if this return to analogue media is nothing more than a trend and small symbolic gesture, or if this shift in how younger generations consume media will make these industries reconsider their decision.