Why Are Secondhand Books Flying Off Shelves? AI’s Secret Reading List!

In recent months, secondhand bookstores have noticed a strange new trend: large, unexpected orders for books that are then shipped to distant warehouses. Stuart Manley, who runs Barter Books in Northumberland, typically sells two or three thousand books each week. However, he recently received a single order from a Canadian company that matched his usual weekly sales. After three decades in the business, Manley says he has never seen anything like this. He is not alone, as booksellers around the world are reporting similar bulk purchases. The buyers’ identities and intentions are unclear, but many suspect that these books are not being bought for readers, but for artificial intelligence, or AI, systems that need vast amounts of information to learn and improve.

This suspicion is linked to a recent court case in the United States. In 2025, a judge ruled that it was not against US copyright law for companies to buy books and use them to train AI software. The case involved three authors who challenged the practice, but the judge decided that using the books in this way was 'exceedingly transformative' and therefore legal. When court documents were made public, it was revealed that some companies, like Anthropic, were destroying books as part of the process of training their AI chatbot, Claude. The company explained that they use a mix of publicly available web data, purchased datasets, and their own generated data to train their AI. They also said that buying and destroying books for training is common in the AI industry, but they do not target rare or antique books. Still, the idea of books being destroyed makes many people uncomfortable.

The process, known as destructive scanning, involves sending books to special locations where they are quickly digitized. This often means removing the book’s spine so the pages can be scanned efficiently, after which the physical book is recycled. Internal company messages referred to this project as 'Project Panama,' with the goal of scanning as many books as possible. The types of books being bought are varied, from obscure Latin texts to old cowboy novels, which suggests that AI companies are looking for a wide range of material to improve their language models. Experts say that rare and unusual books can help AI systems learn more effectively. However, copyright laws differ between countries. In the UK, for example, permission from the copyright owner is required to copy and use books for AI training.

Booksellers are facing a dilemma. While they are glad to finally sell books that have been on their shelves for years, they are uneasy about the idea of these books being destroyed. Some books are extremely rare, and losing them would be a significant cultural loss. Others, like popular novels with millions of copies in circulation, may not be as important to preserve. The debate raises ethical questions about the value of books, the responsibilities of booksellers, and the impact of new technology on the world of literature. As AI continues to grow, the fate of secondhand books and the knowledge they contain is becoming a topic of serious discussion among booksellers, readers, and technology experts alike.