Key facts
- Secondhand booksellers are experiencing a surge in bulk orders from unknown buyers.
- The purchases are suspected to be for AI companies to use books as training data.
- A US court ruling in 2025 deemed the use of purchased books for AI training as 'exceedingly transformative' and legal.
- Internal documents from an AI firm referred to a project aiming to 'destructively scan all the books in the world'.
- Destructive scanning involves digitizing books by removing pages, often leading to the book's destruction.
- Booksellers are concerned about the ethical implications of books being destroyed, particularly rare editions.
- UK copyright law requires permission from copyright owners for creating training libraries.
A significant increase in secondhand book sales, characterized by large, unusual bulk orders, has been observed by booksellers globally. This phenomenon has led to speculation that the demand is being driven by artificial intelligence companies seeking to acquire vast quantities of texts for training their large language models. Booksellers like Stuart Manley of Barter Books have reported receiving orders equivalent to a week's sales in a single transaction, a trend unprecedented in their decades of experience.
The suspicion that AI firms are behind these purchases stems from a US court ruling in 2025. In a lawsuit brought by three authors against AI firm Anthropic, a judge determined that using purchased books to train AI software was permissible under US copyright law, deeming the use 'exceedingly transformative.' Unsealed court documents further revealed that the process of ingesting books for training Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude, involved 'destructive scanning,' where books are digitized at an industrial scale, often by removing their spines before being recycled.
Anthropic stated that sourcing books is a common industry practice and that their data acquisition programs do not target rare or antiquarian books. However, the revelation of destructive scanning has caused unease among booksellers. David Tobin of Walden Books expressed concern that books, even those not rare, might ultimately be destroyed. Experts suggest that the diverse and sometimes obscure nature of the books being purchased could be an effort to provide fresh material to improve the training of large language models.
Copyright laws in the UK differ from those in the US, with the starting point being that copying acts for training libraries require the copyright owner's permission, according to Professor Emily Hudson, an intellectual property specialist at Oxford University. This presents an ethical dilemma for booksellers, who are uncomfortable with the idea of books being destroyed, especially unique or historically significant editions. While some books may not be considered essential to preserve, the potential destruction of a sole surviving copy of an 18th-century edition, for instance, is a significant concern. Some booksellers, however, acknowledge that recycling unwanted books can be beneficial, especially when it boosts trade, with one noting that 'the world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code.'