Secondhand booksellers in the UK and Ireland are reporting a flurry of bulk orders from mystery buyers, amid speculation AI companies are acquiring the tomes for their data. Bookshops contacted by the Guardian say they have been receiving orders from buyers in the US, Canada, continental Europe and the UK. The increase has been replicated around the world, with booksellers in the US, Australia and Europe also reporting unusual orders.
Stuart Manley, the co-owner of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, said the orders, which began arriving three months ago, were unusual because they did not follow the typical pattern of being grouped into themes such as sport or motoring. Manley said he had sold “hundreds” of random books to three buyers for a total of about £4,000. Jim Shaughnessy, the owner of MW Books in Claregalway, Ireland, said his business had been receiving large, varied orders since May.
One, the Canada-based Zoom Books, which has featured in other media reports, describes itself as “North America’s leading book recycling company”. Zoom has been contacted for comment by the Guardian. One UK-based secondhand bookseller, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some random orders could come from different buyers but be delivered to the same address.
One delivery postcode seen by the Guardian and used by different buyers points to a group of freight warehouses near Heathrow airport. The bookseller, who has received orders for 6,000 books from similar buyers since January worth thousands of pounds, said the buyers were paying “top whack” and were not seeking a discount despite requesting titles in bulk. The spate of orders has fuelled speculation among booksellers that AI companies are acquiring the books to scan their contents before pulping them.
Manley said: “My theory is that it’s masses and masses of AI money being squandered.” The Washington Post revealed this year that Anthropic, a leading AI company and developer of the Claude chatbot, had spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring books and slicing off their spines so their contents could be scanned before the books were sent for recycling. Anthropic said: “Claude is trained on a mix of publicly available web data, commercially acquired datasets, and data we generate ourselves. Sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry.
None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” Last month, the tech news site 404 Media reported that a books database was telling booksellers “the world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf”, adding that books published before 2022 were ideal material for AI companies because their text was unpolluted by material that could have been generated by chatbots. The database in question, ISBNdb, said the report was based on a webpage that was a “test of market interest” and had since been taken down. AI tools such as chatbots are “trained” on vast amounts of data to help them generate responses, a requirement that has set tech companies searching for fresh sources of material to build new models.
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