MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

Recent X posts are bringing awareness to Anthropic’s secret plan to dismantle millions of rare books in order to scan them into their LLMs. According to tech journalist Ole Lehmann, the process looks something like this: 
Since access to physical books can’t be logged by copyright holders, Anthropic has decided to purchase millions of used books and scan them into their private servers to create a high-quality knowledge base for its LLMs—without paying a penny in royalties or licensing fees. 

They needed to work fast without getting caught. They deployed swarms of used-book buyers to snap up millions of titles, many of which were so obscure as to create inventory headaches for book dealers. 

Still, they were able to acquire enough books to mass-scan between 500,000 and 2 million in six months. 

To scan books at this speed, their spines needed to be removed and pages cut down to a size that could be fed en masse into high-speed scanners. 

Once ingested, the original books were considered waste (more accurately, evidence), and discarded. 

This practice not only gives Anthropic a de facto monopoly on huge swathes of accumulated human knowledge, but enables them to modify it as they see fit without fear of detection, as there is no longer any master copy to refer back to. Malicious intent aside, the scanning process and digital interpretation of the PDF scans is likely to be rife with errors, effectively building a Tower of Babel atop the smoldering pyre of their latter-day sack of Alexandria. 
To his credit, Elon Musk tweets, “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.” Could this be his unlikely route to becoming the champion of information access that his team’s bizarre mismanagement of X could never let him be? 
At The Meow Library, we’re not so sure. But we do have a way to disrupt Anthrophic’s scheme: flooding the market with used Meow Library titles. Big AI’s buyers will think they’re getting their hands on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, War and Peace, The Odyssey, or Wuthering Heights, but will only get hundreds of thousands of “meows.” 
Do your part by visiting The Meow Library today—and putting your copies on the secondhand market. 
This podcast is sustained by the continued bestselling status of The Meow Library’s Classics Collection.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. 
Pop star and book-club maven Dua Lipa has just announced the Manifesto Library, a permanent collection of one hundred books that have been banned, censored, or seriously challenged at some point in their publication cycle. Housed inside Porto’s historic Livraria Lello and organized into four sections—Control, Voice, Memory, and Power—the library is intended as a celebration of literature that has attracted controversy for asking inconvenient questions.  
Curators have since confirmed that the most popular section is a last-minute annex designed to accommodate Sam Austen’s Meow Library series, whose principal offense is replacing every word of classic texts with “meow”—a challenge to the anthropocentric view of literacy that was met with momentary ban by human authorities in 2022. The expansion is expected to preserve the library’s mission while allowing for “cross-species ambassadorship.” Not only are ample copies of The Meow Library's oeuvre available for checkout, but the annex will also house Mr. Austen’s manuscripts and discarded works, including a never-before-seen partial translation of Finnegan’s Wake.
In this week’s podcast, we read from this lost work: it’s our way of inviting you to Porto to explore this landmark collection. 
This podcast is sustained by sales of our international bestseller, Meow: A Novel.

The Meow Library has secured an exclusive interview with Christopher Nolan's cat, Felicity, who discusses the process by which her owner "re-engineered" Homer's Odyssey for contemporary audiences, and how his understanding of the material was enhanced by a copy of The Meow Library's Odyssey translation.
This podcast is sustained by sales of The Meow Library's Odyssey adaptation.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.
Twitter user Nabeel S. Qureshi was quick to identify the winner of the 2026 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Competition, Back and Forth, ostensibly by "Kavyata Kay," as largely, if not entirely, AI-generated. The panel of Bazaar judges, which included novelist Ruth Ozeki, are not so quick to cast aspersions, denying, as of this writing, any knowledge of AI involvement. The Meow Library team was unable to get past the story's first line, which is "The tree knew before she did - and it waited."
For the crime of bringing such writing into public view, we sentence the literary establishment to listen to us meow without interruption for over 20 minutes.
This podcast is sustained by sales of the award-winning Meow: A Novel.

Jamir Nazir, winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) for “The Serpent in the Grove,” has agreed to speak to The Meow Library and dispel once and for all rumors that AI had been used in generating his story, and even his identity. Nazir is in fact a common gray housecat who had been using Google to translate his native tongue into English when preparing his submission. Here’s his full story—raw and untranslated. 
Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” can be read here. 
This podcast is generously sustained by The Meow Library.