Mystery Bulk Orders Hint at AI Training Spree
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- Barter Books co-owner Stuart Manley reports selling "hundreds" of random books to three buyers for about £4,000 over three months, with single orders spanning an Estonian translation of John le Carré's The Mission Song, a specific imprint of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and the October 1983 Warship magazine
- MW Books owner Jim Shaughnessy has received large, varied orders since May, describing selections ranging from 18th-century African agricultural implements to 1950s racing-car biographies as "sporadic, presumably machine-driven"
- An anonymous UK bookseller says buyers have ordered 6,000 books worth thousands of pounds since January at full price with no discounts, with deliveries routed to freight warehouses near Heathrow airport rather than personal addresses
- Zoom Books, a Canada-based company that bills itself as "North America's leading book recycling company," has appeared as a buyer across multiple sellers contacted by the Guardian
- Anthropic says it does not "buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books," after the Washington Post reported the company spent tens of millions of dollars slicing spines off books for scanning before recycling
- ISBNdb removed a webpage claiming "the world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," telling 404 Media it was a "test of market interest" rather than a data-sales offer
- Orders are typically placed through book marketplaces including Biblio and Amazon-owned AbeBooks, both of which were contacted for comment
Why it matters: The premium pricing and Heathrow freight-warehouse delivery points show AI training-data acquisition isn't theoretical — it is actively reshaping the used-book trade. Anthropic alone has spent tens of millions on spine-sliced scanning, and secondhand sellers are now unwitting intermediaries feeding models with pre-internet texts.
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