Suspicious bulk orders of used books have led many booksellers to believe they are being purchased on behalf of AI companies so that they can be scanned and used as training material without author consent or payment.
An AirTag hidden inside a rare book sold as part of a bulk order appears to confirm the theory after it ended up at an Amazon AI training facility …
Booksellers specializing in the sale of used books normally receive orders for individual titles or perhaps a small number of related books. For quite some time, however, a number of them have reported receiving massive bulk orders for used books, with no apparent connection between the titles.
The suspicion is that they’re being purchased by AI companies who strip the bindings and use high-speed scanning equipment to ingest the text and feed it into AI systems for use as training material.
Doing so without the consent of the authors and without offering any payment for the use of their work is at the very least unethical, but there hasn’t yet been any concrete proof that this is happening. * 404 Media’s* investigation appears to change this.
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
The report is paywalled, but * TNW* reports on the findings, noting that the tracking device used was an AirTag, with staff at the facility confirming what goes on there.
Employees told 404 Media what the work involves. Large shipments of printed books arrive, staff slice the bindings off so they can scan the pages faster, and the book does not survive it. The logo on the door is a dinosaur holding a book and baring its teeth.
Used books are especially valuable because anything published after 2022 may potentially include text written or edited by AI systems; effectively, they could be training AI systems on AI output. While publishing contracts invariably explicitly prohibit authors from using AI-generated content, there are likely to be some who ignore this. There are also no effective controls when it comes to self-published books.
Part of the problem is that intellectual property laws have not yet caught up with the practice. While this would likely be illegal in the UK, a 2025 ruling in the US somehow declared it lawful as a “transformative” use of the copyrighted material.
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