Books Are Not Dying - They Are Evolving in the Age of AI

Wusatullah Khan's recent [Urdu] column, "The Last Gasp of Books", raises an important topic, but some of its claims and conclusions do not hold up when examined against available data and ground realities. The column opens with a dramatic prediction: within a few years, most people will be hunting for books and will often fail to find even a single copy. Those who have managed to preserve their collections will, he suggests, boastfully taunt others about owning books on certain subjects.

A responsible reader's duty is not to accept an emotionally charged narrative at face value, but to form an opinion based on numbers, actual conditions, and logical reasoning. In that spirit, it becomes necessary to examine some of the assumptions and conclusions in the column, so that the discussion can move beyond surface impressions and toward more solid research.

The AI Bulk Purchasing Claim

The first point to note is that linking every large bulk purchase of books to an AI company is not yet a proven pattern. The ISBN database itself has denied certain allegations and speculative claims surrounding such purchases. The widely discussed case involving a sum of around 1.5 billion dollars was indeed real, but the core legal issue was not a fine for cutting up legally purchased physical books. The real problem was the acquisition of millions of pirated digital copies of copyrighted works.

This distinction matters. It changes the entire framing of the debate from "AI companies destroying books" to "AI companies violating copyright at scale". The two are not the same.

Are Physical Books Really Disappearing?

The central exaggeration in the column is the idea that physical books are on the verge of vanishing from the world. There is not just a lack of solid evidence for this claim; recent data from major publishing markets actually paints the opposite picture.

According to figures released in June 2026 by the UK Publishers Association, covering the year 2025, the British publishing industry reached a record revenue of 7.4 billion pounds. The breakdown is revealing:

Print book revenue: 3.8 billion pounds
Digital book revenue: 3.6 billion pounds

In other words, in a year when AI was expanding faster than ever, a major global publishing market still saw higher revenue from printed books than from digital formats. Do these ground realities match the image of "the last gasp of the book"?

Libraries Are Not Abandoning Print

If books were truly on their way out, why do university, national, research, and public libraries around the world continue to allocate significant annual budgets for new books and collections? The reality is that libraries have adapted to modern demands. They have not stopped buying printed books; they have broadened what "acquiring books" means. Today, library budgets cover print books, digital collections, audio and visual material, databases, journals, and e-books.

For example, at the University of California, Davis Library, roughly thirty percent of the budget is dedicated to books, journals, databases, and media. The shift has been partial - from print toward digital - not total. The more accurate description is not that "the book is dying", but that "the book's information ecosystem is changing".

That said, the columnist's concern about rare and out-of-print books is serious and valid. Destroying the last few surviving copies of rare works would indeed be a severe blow to cultural heritage preservation.

Rare Books vs Rare Texts

An important distinction often gets blurred: "rare books" and "rare texts" are not the same thing. If a 1750 edition of a work is scanned and then one physical copy is destroyed, but thirty other copies exist in libraries around the world, a historical object has been lost, but the text itself has not disappeared. On the other hand, if only one or two copies of a book exist anywhere, then destroying them after digitization is a very different matter from a preservation standpoint.

This means we need to think in terms of three separate concepts:

Work, edition, and physical copy. A single work can have many editions, and one edition can have thousands of physical copies. Wusatullah Khan's column sometimes treats these three as if they were the same thing, and that is where its research weakness lies.

Can AI Agents "Monopolize Knowledge"?

The idea that AI agents might one day "take control of knowledge" feels far-fetched. The world's intellectual heritage is not stored on a single AI company's server. For any AI firm to become the sole provider of human knowledge by eliminating actual books is, practically speaking, an almost impossible mission.

However, there is a real and present danger hidden in the current situation, one that can already be seen in social media writing habits. The book exists, but the reader or writer has stopped making the effort to reach it. People increasingly rely on machine-generated summaries instead of engaging with original sources.

The Real Threat: Distance from Primary Sources

The real danger is not that books will disappear, but that readers will drift away from primary sources. That may well be the key to the entire issue.

Today, if a student wants to learn about Ibn Khaldun, Ghalib, Mir, Marx, Darwin, or a historical event, they are more likely to ask an AI than to open the original book. The reason is simple: AI delivers a clean, neat answer in ten seconds. This has created a new three-layer structure:

Primary source, AI explanation, and reader. The problem is that a computerized system now sits between the reader and the source. Because of this, it is not entirely wrong to conclude that AI's growing dominance has introduced issues of misrepresentation, obscurity, misinformation, ideological bias, and commercial filtering.

The Real Solution

The answer to this danger is not to try to "protect books from AI". The solution is to ensure that primary sources remain preserved, easily discoverable, citable, and freely accessible. In other words, the focus should be on strengthening access to original material, not on resisting new tools of access.

Books Are Changing, Not Vanishing

Books are not ending. Their usage is changing. Their distribution methods are changing. A large part of academic publishing has already gone digital. Much of the reference book world has moved online. AI has created a new intermediary layer for accessing information.

Even so, demand for physical books remains a multi-billion dollar industry. In the UK, print accounted for 79 percent of consumer publishing revenue in 2025.

The columnist has described a real incident and raised genuine ethical and social questions. But the conclusion drawn from them is emotionally powerful yet intellectually and research-wise weak.