Secondhand Book Sales Boom: Is AI the Culprit?

## Unusual Sales Patterns Independent booksellers have been observing a strange pattern of purchases over the last few months. In a typical week, Stuart Manley from Barter Books in Northumberland would sell around 2,000 to 3,000 books. However, a recent single bulk order from a Canadian company equalled what he would expect to move in seven days. This unusual sales pattern has been reported by booksellers from around the world, with some selling as many as 10,000 books in a single order. The booksellers are unsure of the final destination for their books, but they suspect that they are not being bought for avid overseas readers. Instead, they believe that the books are being purchased for something with a voracious appetite for new information: AI. ## The Court Ruling The idea that the secondhand sales boom is being driven by the explosive growth of AI can be traced back to a court ruling in the US. In 2025, a judge ruled that using books purchased in this way to train AI software was not a violation of US copyright law. The decision was the result of a lawsuit brought against AI firm Anthropic by three authors. The ruling stated that Anthropic's use of the authors' books was "exceedingly transformative" and therefore allowed under US law. When court documents were unsealed last month, it emerged that books were being destroyed in the process of training Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude. The company's spokesperson insisted that sourcing books for training was a widely used approach across the AI industry, and that none of their data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books. ## Destructive Scanning The court documents relating to the Anthropic case revealed the project of ingesting old books was referred to in internal company communications as "Project Panama." The documents indicated the company's aim was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Destructive scanning is the process of shipping books to locations where they can be digitised at an industrial scale. This includes removing a book's spine so all the pages can be scanned rapidly, and the remains recycled. Experts say the diverse subject matter of the books being purchased also points to AI, as unusual and rare texts could provide fresh material to improve the training of large language models. Professor Emily Hudson, intellectual property specialist at Oxford University, says that copyright laws in the UK are different to those in the US. In the UK, all acts of copying, including creating the training library and doing the training, require the permission of the copyright owner. ## Ethical Concerns For the booksellers, the situation poses a dilemma. They are uncomfortable with the idea of books being destroyed, even if they admit that not every title needs to be saved. Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's, says that while some books may be rare, others may not be such a great loss if one copy is destroyed. However, he also notes that some books, such as the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century, would be a significant loss if destroyed. Stuart Manley from Barter Books suggests that recycling books is a good solution for many titles which the public no longer want on their shelves. He notes that some books, such as The Da Vinci Code, are no longer needed in large quantities.