Secondhand Book Sales Surge Tied to AI Training
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- Independent booksellers worldwide report unusual bulk orders from overseas buyers — Stuart Manley of Barter Books received a single Canadian order equivalent to his typical week's sales of 2,000 to 3,000 books, saying he has "never seen the like of this after 30 years in the second-hand book trade"
- The boom traces to a 2025 US ruling where Judge William Alsup deemed Anthropic's use of purchased books to train AI "exceedingly transformative" and not a copyright violation, in a lawsuit brought by three authors
- Unsealed court documents revealed Anthropic's internal effort "Project Panama" intended to "destructively scan all the books in the world" to train its Claude chatbot, with Anthropic confirming books were destroyed in the process
- Destructive scanning involves removing a book's spine to digitise all pages industrially, then recycling the remains — a process Manley says booksellers have long discussed on industry forums without knowing Project Panama's name
- Oxford professor Emily Hudson notes UK copyright law diverges sharply: copying for AI training libraries requires permission from copyright owners, unlike the US framework that cleared Anthropic's use
- Derek Walker of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's warns of an ethical dilemma, noting that destruction of a rare 18th-century edition — the only known surviving example — would be "a much more significant problem" than recycling surplus copies
Why it matters: The secondhand book market has quietly become an AI training supply chain, with rare and historically significant editions potentially destroyed in industrial-scale digitisation — a tension UK copyright law addresses more strictly than the US, where Judge Alsup's 2025 ruling cleared Anthropic's "exceedingly transformative" use. Booksellers who spent decades building inventory now sell stock they suspect will be pulped rather than read.
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