Secondhand booksellers in Australia say they may have become part of a supply chain that feeds old books into artificial intelligence training programs. Some believe their stock is being bought, scanned, and then destroyed.
Tim White runs an independent bookshop called Books for Cooks. He was setting up his stall for the Melbourne Rare Book Fair when he spoke about the issue.
White said the physical book matters as much as the words inside it. He said many rare booksellers feel the same way about the items they sell.
The concern grew after a copyright lawsuit filed against the AI company Anthropic in the United States. Book authors brought the case forward.
Court documents showed Anthropic had been buying physical books, cutting off the spines, scanning the pages, and then pulping what remained. The company reportedly tried to keep the practice quiet.
A judge ruled the scanning was lawful under US copyright law. The judge said it counted as transformative use.
Unusual Orders Raise Questions
Reports suggest the destructive scanning practice has spread across the AI industry. Some booksellers in Australia say they have noticed unusual buying patterns that match this trend.
Several vendors said they received large orders from a company called Zoom Books. The company describes itself as a book recycler based in Canada.
Delfina Manor, who owns a bookshop in Benalla, Victoria, said she received an order for three full boxes of books in May. She said the order took hours to pack and asked the company not to order in that volume again.
John Sainsbury, who owns a Melbourne bookshop, said he also received a wave of orders from Zoom Books around the same time. He said the requests were price insensitive and covered a wide range of random, low-value titles.
One order included a 1970s manual on soil mechanics, a poetry collection, and a local history book. The poetry title had sold for nine dollars after sitting on the shelf for twenty years.
Booksellers Divided On What It Means
Not every bookseller is alarmed. Nick Dawes, who runs a shop with about 500,000 books in storage, said he would be glad to offload stock in bulk, as long as it wasn't a rare or one-of-a-kind item.
White drew a similar line. He said a cheap book with many copies in circulation is different from a rare book with a real story behind it.
Rare bookseller Gwenyth Todd said she screens buyers carefully before selling valuable items. She said she does not want her books ending up in the wrong hands.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the company has never purchased books from Zoom Books. The spokesperson said Anthropic sources its books from mainstream commercial markets and does not destroy rare or antiquarian material.
Zoom Books has denied destructively scanning books. A spokesperson said the company resells books intact and only recycles them when they cannot be rehomed.
The company would not say whether it sells intact books to AI firms for scanning, citing confidentiality agreements with its customers. Zoom Books co-founder Manroop Gill recently said on LinkedIn that the company has been expanding fast in recent months.
