Secondhand book sales surge as AI firms fuel demand for old titles

Secondhand booksellers across the world are reporting an unusual surge in bulk purchases, with thousands of books being shipped to warehouses in what some believe could be an emerging supply chain for artificial intelligence (AI) training.

A recent BBC report found that independent booksellers have been receiving unusually large orders for books ranging from obscure Latin texts to cowboy novels, raising questions about whether the titles are ultimately being bought for readers or for AI-related projects.

Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland said his shop normally sells between 2,000 and 3,000 books in a typical week. However, a single recent order from a Canadian company matched the volume of books he would normally sell in seven days.

He says he has "never seen the like of this after 30 years in the second-hand book trade".

Manley is among a growing number of booksellers who have reported similar bulk purchases. However, they have little information about where the books eventually end up.

One theory is that the books are being acquired to feed the growing demand for training data for AI models.

Court ruling puts books in spotlight

The possibility that the secondhand book market is being tapped by AI companies gained attention following a US court ruling in 2025.

A US judge ruled that Anthropic's use of books purchased to train its AI systems did not violate copyright law. The case was brought against the AI company by three authors.

Judge William Alsup said Anthropic's use of the authors' books was "exceedingly transformative" and therefore permitted under US law.

Court documents unsealed last month subsequently revealed that some books were being destroyed as part of the process of training Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude.

"Claude is trained on a mix of publicly available web data, commercially acquired datasets, and data we generate ourselves," a spokesperson said.

They said obtaining books for AI training was a widely used practice across the industry.

"None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books," they added.

The revelation has nevertheless raised concerns among booksellers about the fate of books that are being purchased in large quantities.

David Tobin, who runs Walden Books in north London, said the increased demand had brought some long-unsold titles back into circulation.

"In some ways it's very nice to sell some of these titles which haven't been sold for many years, but it would be sad if they are ultimately destroyed," he says.

What is destructive scanning?

Court records from the Anthropic case referred to the company's book-digitisation project as "Project Panama".

Internal communications indicated that the project's objective was to "destructively scan all the books in the world".

Destructive scanning involves sending physical books to facilities where they can be digitised on an industrial scale. Their spines are removed so the pages can be scanned quickly, after which the physical remains can be recycled.

"A lot of mystery surrounds Project Panama," Manley, from Barter Books, says.

"The name is new to me, but the reality of the project is not, and has been the subject of much discussion on the bookseller forums."

Manley said he had no evidence that his books were being purchased specifically for Project Panama or similar projects run by other AI companies.

He said the purchases were difficult to explain because they appeared to have "no rhyme or reason", covering a wide range of subjects and genres.

Experts say the variety itself could be an indication of AI-related demand. Rare or unusual texts can provide new material for training large language models, the technology behind generative AI tools such as chatbots.

Professor Emily Hudson, an intellectual property specialist at Oxford University, said UK copyright law differs significantly from the US position.

"The starting point in the UK is that all these acts of copying - creating the training library and doing the training – require the permission of the copyright owner," she says.

Booksellers face an ethical dilemma

The unusual demand has left booksellers facing a complicated question: while bulk sales are welcome, they are uneasy about the possibility that the books could be destroyed after being digitised.

Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's, said the destruction of some books would have little impact on the preservation of knowledge, particularly when other copies are readily available.

"A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's.

"But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century.

"It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

For Manley, however, recycling unwanted books is not necessarily a bad outcome, particularly if it helps revive demand for titles that have spent years sitting unsold.

"Some may have ethical concerns about where the books end up and if they're destroyed," he says.

"But the world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code.

"I've had books advertised for 20 years on the web which haven't sold until now".