Secondhand booksellers in UK and Ireland suspect AI firms behind ‘strange’ bulk orders
TL;DR
Booksellers in the UK and Ireland report unusual bulk orders from anonymous buyers in the US, Canada and Europe. The suspicion is that AI companies are buying up stock to scan it and use it as training data. Dealers in the US, Australia and continental Europe describe the same pattern. The background is the Anthropic case, where millions were spent on books to digitise them for data acquisition.
Nauti's Take
For small secondhand shops, bulk orders from anonymous buyers are an unexpected opportunity: real revenue, and proof that printed text has become valuable training material. The problem is everything around it.
Buyers stay anonymous, the books get cut apart and scanned, and the authors see none of that money. Sellers gain in the short term, while writers have every reason to push harder on the compensation question now.
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