“Sometimes books tell you more than the content,” says Tim White, as he lines up carefully dust-jacketed books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves on temporary shelves in Melbourne University’s Wilson Hall.
He’s preparing his stall for this weekend’s Melbourne Rare Book Fair. For people like White, who runs independent bookshop Books for Cooks, the book as a physical object is just as important as what’s inside it.
“We’re interested in where food and society connect … So we just keep pushing the boundaries, looking for things that show unusual aspects of that, things that tell us a bit more about what it is to be human,” he says.
“That’s what most of us [rare booksellers] do. We handle things that have a story.”
But vendors and rare books experts are increasingly worried that these artefacts may be under threat of destruction by generative AI companies seeking to feed their ravenous technology with new texts.
Fears stem from a copyright lawsuit brought against AI company Anthropic in the United States by book authors. Unsealed court files revealed earlier this year that the company was engaging in the practice of “destructive scanning” – buying physical books, slicing off the spines to more efficiently scan the pages, then pulping the remains – and had sought to keep it quiet. The judge ruled this was lawful under US copyright law, as it amounted to “transformative use”.
The practice is now understood to be widespread among generative AI companies, and recent reports suggest intermediaries are stepping up to facilitate the process. Australian secondhand booksellers are wondering if they have been caught up in the AI supply chain after they recently experienced waves of orders that did not fit with usual customer patterns.
Multiple vendors confirmed to Guardian Australia they had received orders from a Canadian company called Zoom Books, which describes itself as a book recycler. The orders usually came through large secondhand marketplaces like Abebooks or Biblio, where inventory can range from cheap paperbacks to rare, expensive items.
Delfina Manor, who runs Good Reading Secondhand Books in Benalla, Victoria, said she received orders from Zoom Books in May amounting to three full boxes, but had to write to the company and ask them not to order in such volume again.
“They ordered, paid in advance, and they didn’t quibble over the postage … [but] it would have been about 30-40 books, and so finding them, packing them, making sure you hadn’t missed one out … It was just driving me nuts,” Manor said.
John Sainsbury, owner of Melbourne’s Sainsburys Books, confirmed a slew of orders from Zoom Books had come through the store’s online listings around the same time. The orders were price insensitive, and appeared entirely random – niche titles, “bottom-end” and sometimes decades-old stock. The orders resulted in Sainsburys shipping multiple boxes overseas.
Sainsbury described his company as “a general bookseller at an antiquarian book fair”, as he doesn’t just deal in rare material. The profile fits the pattern of vendors who have received similar orders – high-end specialist sellers did not appear to have been approached.
Some vendors speculated the company may be buying the books on arbitrage – common enough in the secondhand book trade – but the specific requests nevertheless seemed odd. In one order, a 1970s manual on soil mechanics was bought alongside a 2010 book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling, a collection of Early Australian Poetry (1982), and a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. The poetry book sold for $9 and had been on the shelf for 20 years.
White says the issue raises “an interesting tension”. “If it’s a $20 book of which there’s … 500,000 copies in Australia, I wouldn’t cry,” he says. “I’d have different issues around copyright.”
“If it’s a book that has that storytelling element to it, or it’s a one-off, it’s horrific.”
For booksellers struggling to catalogue their vast stock of books, let alone sell them, such sales aren’t necessarily bad. Nick Dawes, who runs Grant’s Bookshop with his wife, Jenny, estimates they have about 500,000 books in their warehouses.
“If somebody wanted to come and buy all my books and cut them up, well … I’d be unhappy at one level, but I’d be happy at another,” says Dawes. “But if somebody said to me, look, this is the only known copy, I’m going to cut it up, then I’d say, I think I’d rather not send it to you.”
AI companies are not the first to destroy books for profit. Some vendors source rare books in order to slice them up and sell the illustration plates individually.
“When I sell a book and then find the prints available individually, I just find it physically abhorrent,” says rare bookseller Gwenyth Todd, from Chatelaine Books. She screens buyers accordingly, so the books don’t go “to the wrong home”.
“To me books are more than just objects.”
An Anthropic spokesperson said the company has never bought from Zoom Books, but that “sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry”. Anthropic procures its books from mainstream commercial markets, the spokesperson said. “None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.”
Zoom Books’ co-founder, Manroop Gill, said in a recent LinkedIn post that the company had been “expanding aggressively” in the past months.
Zoom Books has previously denied it destructively scans books. A spokesperson told Guardian Australia: “We acquire secondhand books and resell them intact. We do not digitize books. Our priority is always reuse, and when a book can no longer be rehomed, it is responsibly recycled.”
The company did not disclose if it sold intact books to AI companies for destructive scanning, saying: “Our commercial agreements require confidentiality, so we do not disclose or discuss our customers.”