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.
“It’s definitely a strange combination of books,” said Manley. “Normally a book order is on a theme but this is all over the place.”
A recent order included requests for an Estonian translation of John le Carré’s The Mission Song, a copy of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey from a specific imprint and the October 1983 edition of Warship, a monthly magazine. 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.
“They are sporadic, presumably machine-driven and have little in terms of thematic currency; books on agricultural implements in 18th century Africa through to biographies of 1950s racing car drivers,” he said. “Personally, I don’t see we have the right to dictate what any customer does with their purchases but it is more than curious to see what’s being selected.”
David Gower-Spence, the owner of BookLovers of Bath, said he had received a rush of orders between May and July for about 200 books from buyers who have also been cited by other sellers contacted by the Guardian for this article.
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.
“It was overwhelming for a while and I’m relatively well organised,” said Gower-Spence.
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. “The aliases behind these orders are very opaque even to experienced booksellers,” the source said.
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.
“It’s disrupting the secondhand bookselling business because this isn’t typical for the trade,” the bookseller said. “It appears to be either a human or a machine dipping into the sandbox of secondhand books and what they are buying makes no sense in terms of the wider trends in the market.”
The Guardian reported this month that Australian booksellers had also received a burst of orders, with one saying the sudden scale of demand was “driving me nuts”.
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. Secondhand books, some of them published decades before ChatGPT exploded on to the scene and not available online, could be a source of fresh data.
One post on an online forum for booksellers, seen by the Guardian, said: “Shame these are all destined for AI training, and will therefore get the covers stripped and ultimately end up being pulped.”
Other posts expressed puzzlement at the erratic orders, while some questioned whether they could be intended for AI training when requests included books available for nothing in the public online domain such as Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726.
Orders are typically placed through book marketplaces including Biblio and the Amazon-owned AbeBooks. Biblio and AbeBooks have been contacted by the Guardian for comment.