Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?
Booksellers are reporting mysterious bulk orders. It's thought the books are being used to train AI - and ending up pulped.
A puzzling surge in secondhand book sales has led to speculation that artificial intelligence (AI) may be the driving force.
Independent booksellers worldwide have noticed an unusual trend over recent months: numerous novels are being purchased and shipped to distant warehouses. Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland typically sells two to three thousand books weekly. However, a single recent bulk order from a Canadian company matched his usual seven-day sales volume. Manley, with 30 years in the secondhand book trade, stated he has "never seen the like of this."
Booksellers are unsure of the ultimate destination for these books, but many suspect they are not for overseas readers. Instead, the prevailing theory is that they are being acquired by AI, which has a voracious appetite for new information.
This boom in secondhand sales is thought to be linked to a 2025 US court ruling. A judge determined that using purchased books to train AI software did not violate US copyright law. This decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed against AI firm Anthropic by three authors. Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of the authors' books was "exceedingly transformative," thus permissible under US law.
Last month, unsealed court documents revealed that books were being destroyed during the training process for Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude. A spokesperson for Anthropic stated, "Claude is trained on a mix of publicly available web data, commercially acquired datasets, and data we generate ourselves," adding that sourcing books for training is a common practice in the AI industry. They also insisted, "None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books."
Nevertheless, the notion of books being pulped is causing concern. David Tobin, who runs Walden Books in north London and has also experienced unusual sales, commented, "In some ways it's very nice to sell some of these titles which haven't been sold for many years, but it would be sad if they are ultimately destroyed."
The Anthropic court documents referred to the project of ingesting old books as "Project Panama" in internal company communications. The documents indicated the company's goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Destructive scanning involves shipping books to facilities where they are digitized on an industrial scale, which includes removing the spine to rapidly scan pages, with the remains then recycled.
Manley from Barter Books noted, "A lot of mystery surrounds Project Panama. The name is new to me, but the reality of the project is not, and has been the subject of much discussion on the bookseller forums." He cannot confirm if his books are being bought for this or similar projects by other AI firms, but he finds the sales, which appear random with "no rhyme or reason," difficult to explain. The purchased books have ranged from obscure Latin texts to cowboy novels.
Experts suggest the diverse subject matter points to AI, as unusual and rare texts could provide fresh material to enhance the training of large language models, the technology behind generative AI tools like chatbots.
Professor Emily Hudson, an intellectual property specialist at Oxford University, highlighted that UK copyright laws differ from those in the US. "The starting point in the UK is that all these acts of copying – creating the training library and doing the training – require the permission of the copyright owner," she explained.
For booksellers, this presents a dilemma. While they are uncomfortable with the idea of books being destroyed, some acknowledge that not every title needs to be preserved. Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's, said, "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market – but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed." However, he added, "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century. It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
Manley believes recycling books is a good solution for many titles no longer desired by the public, especially when it boosts trade. "Some may have ethical concerns about where the books end up and if they're destroyed," he said. "But the world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code. I've had books advertised for 20 years on the web which haven't sold until now."