Transitioning Your Life - Hillary Hutchinson

08/04/2026

NEW BOOK! Dealing with change is out now. Whether you are an academic navigating all the changes in higher education or just trying to navigate change in your own life this book can help you.

07/28/2026

A friend of mine, Ted Swedenburg, posted this on Facebook from an account called "Hedgie." I read the headlines about this, but 404 media is paywalled. Good to have just a little more of the backstory (though it is disturbing). I've posted Elon Musk's response below as well.

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗’ See less

Elon Musk-X.jpeg

13h ago

I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning

07/27/2026

Facebook post for those of you who might be interested.
Expatriates of Student Affairs
Tim Cigelske
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July 25 at 1:05 PM
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Higher ed adjacent open roles just posted

https://bigshoesnetwork.com/.../ascendium-education-group...

04/07/2026

Struggling with unexpected changes in your life? Here are 7 easy strategies to implement now drawn from my new book, Dealing with Change https://mailchi.mp/transitioningyourlife/7-strategies-for-change-right-now

01/06/2026

Would you like make some lasting changes for yourself in the new year? Here are 10 unusual ideas for lasting change. - https://mailchi.mp/transitioningyourlife/ten-unusual-ideas-for-lasting-change

10/07/2025

Stuck and Overwhelmed? Align Your Body and Mind - https://mailchi.mp/176ed2820d45/stuck-and-overwhelmed-align-your-body-and-mind-13653613

10/06/2025

Stuck and Overwhelmed? Align Your Body and Mind - https://mailchi.mp/bb760bb35716/stuck-and-overwhelmed-align-your-body-and-mind-13653615

07/08/2025

How has AI impacted your academic writing journey? Explore the potential opportunities here: https://conta.cc/3IiBPeW

Email from Transitioning Your Life Your quarterly blog for academics and career changers Quarterly Blog for Academics and Career Changers July 2025 Dear Hillary, Are you trying to figure out whether

05/08/2025

Fascinating read for academics:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/may/07/john-urschel-nfl-mit?utm_term=681c9cd7282d21c17dd6453a87fbc545&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

From the article: “It's not quite so clear what the next few years are going to look like for universities – questions around government funding for fundamental research that often leads to important breakthroughs in the foundational sciences"

05/06/2025

This is what happens to me every time I have to do a software update!