Rare, one-of-a-kind books are getting bought up and pulped to train AI
Australian booksellers say a Canadian "book recycler" placed odd bulk orders that fit a pattern AI firms use to feed training data — with irreplaceable titles at risk of being destroyed.
What happened: Secondhand booksellers across Australia say they've received strange bulk orders — price-insensitive, oddly specific, spanning decades-old and niche titles — from a Canadian firm called Zoom Books, which calls itself a book recycler. One shop shipped 30-40 books in a single order; another sent multiple boxes overseas. The pattern echoes a US lawsuit against Anthropic, where unsealed court files showed the company buying physical books, slicing off spines to scan pages faster, then pulping what remained — a practice a judge ruled lawful as 'transformative use.'
Why it matters: Rare and one-off books often hold information, marginalia, or physical history that's never been digitized anywhere else — material historians, researchers, and students rely on as primary sources. Booksellers say they're fine losing mass-produced paperbacks to this process, but a truly unique copy destroyed for AI training data is gone forever, with no digital record replacing what the physical object itself could teach.
How it works, plainly: AI companies need enormous amounts of text to train language models, and out-of-print books are a rich, legally murky source. Rather than buying directly, they can work through intermediaries who purchase stock via marketplaces like AbeBooks or Biblio. Once bought, books can be destructively scanned — spines removed for faster page-scanning — then discarded. Booksellers selling into this chain often don't know the buyer's true purpose, since resale contracts can keep the end customer confidential.
The rollout: Zoom Books denies digitizing books, saying it resells secondhand stock intact and recycles responsibly, but won't say whether it sells to AI companies, citing confidentiality. Anthropic says it has never bought from Zoom Books and doesn't target rare or antiquarian books. With no clear answers, some booksellers, like Chatelaine Books, now screen buyers more carefully to keep unique volumes out of what they call 'the wrong home.'