Secondhand booksellers across the UK and Ireland are reporting a flurry of bulk orders from mystery buyers, amid growing speculation that AI companies are acquiring the books for training data — scanning their contents before the volumes are pulped.
Stuart Manley, co-owner of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, said the orders, which began arriving about three months ago, were unusual because they lacked any thematic logic. One recent order mixed an Estonian translation of John le Carré's The Mission Song, a specific imprint of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and an October 1983 issue of Warship magazine. Manley said he sold 'hundreds' of random books to three buyers for about £4,000 in total.
Jim Shaughnessy of MW Books in Claregalway, Ireland, described orders arriving since May as 'sporadic, presumably machine-driven' — ranging from books on 18th-century African agricultural implements to biographies of 1950s racing drivers.
One UK bookseller said buyers were paying top prices without bargaining, and that delivery addresses traced to a group of freight warehouses near Heathrow Airport. The same bookseller has received orders for about 6,000 books since January.
The speculation follows revelations that Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring books and slicing off their spines to scan the contents before sending them for recycling, as reported by the Washington Post. Anthropic said it does not buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books, and that sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models.
Manley's theory: 'It's masses and masses of AI money being squandered.' For now, the buyers remain opaque — and the books, once scanned, may be gone for good.
