AI's appetite for books sparks secondhand sales boom and destruction concerns

Stuart Manley has sold secondhand books for thirty years. In a normal week at Barter Books in Northumberland, he moves two or three thousand volumes. One recent order from a Canadian company matched an entire week's sales in a single transaction. He has never seen anything like it.

Across the globe, independent booksellers are reporting the same bewildering pattern. Bulk orders arrive with no warning. The purchases are eclectic—obscure Latin texts alongside cowboy novels, rare academic monographs alongside forgotten paperbacks. The buyers remain largely anonymous, their intentions unclear. But booksellers have begun to suspect what is happening: artificial intelligence companies are buying their inventory, not to resell or preserve, but to feed machine learning systems.

The suspicion gained weight in 2025 when a US federal judge ruled that using purchased books to train AI software did not violate copyright law. The case involved three authors suing Anthropic, the company behind Claude, a widely used AI chatbot. Judge William Alsup found Anthropic's use of the authors' work to be "exceedingly transformative" under American law, clearing a legal path for the practice. When court documents were unsealed last month, they revealed something more troubling: the books were not merely being scanned and returned. They were being destroyed in the process.

Internal company communications referred to the project as "Project Panama," with an stated aim to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Destructive scanning is industrial-scale digitization. A book's spine is removed. Pages are fed through high-speed scanners. The remains are recycled. Anthropic's spokesperson acknowledged the practice but framed it as standard across the AI industry. They insisted the company did not target rare or antiquarian editions. Yet the court documents made clear that books—real, physical books—were being pulped to train machines.

For booksellers, the boom in sales creates a genuine moral tension. David Tobin, who runs Walden Books in north London, has experienced the unusual orders himself. He is pleased to finally move titles that have sat unsold for years. But the thought that these books might be destroyed troubles him. Derek Walker, who owns McNaughtan's in Edinburgh, articulates the distinction carefully. A recent academic text published in one hundred copies, with seventy-five already in libraries, might not be a great loss. But his shop has sold books that are the only surviving copies of eighteenth-century editions. If such a volume were purchased for destruction, the loss would be irreversible.

Manley acknowledges the ethical weight but also the practical reality. The world does not need five million copies of The Da Vinci Code. Books that have been advertised for two decades without selling now have buyers. For struggling independent booksellers, the surge in demand is real income. Yet the uncertainty gnaws. They do not know which of their sales are feeding AI training pipelines. The orders seem random, with no discernible pattern. They cannot account for where the books go or what happens to them.

The legal landscape differs sharply across borders. In the United States, the 2025 ruling created a precedent. In the United Kingdom, copyright law begins from a different premise: copying requires permission from the copyright holder. Professor Emily Hudson, an intellectual property specialist at Oxford University, notes this distinction. What is legal in America may not be legal in Britain. But the secondhand book trade operates globally, and the orders keep arriving. Booksellers are caught between the windfall of unexpected sales and the creeping unease that they may be complicit in the erasure of books that have survived centuries.