Chop. Copy. Shred.
Thoughts on Bookselling in the Age of AI
I’ve sold four books to AI companies, which added $439 to my gross sales, before online commissions were subtracted. Three of the books were titles I wouldn’t ordinarily stock; they arrived with books I actually wanted and seemed too valuable to put in my free pile: Analytical Characterization of Aluminum, Steel, and Superalloys (2006); Austronesian and Other Languages of the Pacific and South-East Asia: An Annotated Catalogue of Theses and Dissertations (1981); and Languages of Irian Jaya Checklist: Preliminary Classification, Language Maps, Wordlist (1975). The fourth title gave me more pause. It was a nice first edition in a dust jacket of Al Perkins’s Tubby and the Poo-Bah, a title in Dr. Seuss’s Beginner Books series. For some reason, it’s a slightly scarce book and my $150 first edition was the least expensive copy on Abebooks.
I don’t positively know what happened after I mailed the books to massive logistics warehouses in the middle of the country, but I can make a pretty good guess. They were de-spined by an electric guillotine, fed into a high-speed scanner, and tossed into a Dumpster. A server farm deconstructed the digitized text, reduced it to a series of probabilities, and fed it to one of the large language models behind an AI chatbot.
Along with my colleagues in the used and antiquarian book trade, I find myself at the center of a maelstrom of public outrage over the training of AI models. There’s a good chance you’ve seen a video like this one on social media about the scanning of books by AI companies.1 Or you’ve read one of the rapidly growing number of news articles.
Used books don’t normally get this much attention. The stereotype of used and rare booksellers is that we sit around dressed in tweed reading books all day. Suddenly the goods we sell are indispensable for training AI systems. Around the world, thousands of small, independent shops have received a tsunami of anonymous orders for books.
There are real questions whether scanning books is even legal under copyright law. Judge Vince Chhabria, in a ruling in a case pitting authors against Meta Platforms (the owner of Facebook) doesn’t think it is. “In many circumstances,” he wrote, “it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission.”2
The AI companies are not seeking permission, and to cement their generally dismissive attitude toward the human creators whose work is so essential to their software, they’ve gone about getting books in the shittiest ways possible.
In the first lawsuit to settle—of more than one hundred3 currently underway against AI companies—Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, has agreed to pay the authors and publishers of 500,000 books a total of $1.5 billion for illegally downloading ebooks. The suit had two components, one focusing on pirated ebooks and the other on scanned physical books.
William Allsup, the original judge in the case (Bartz v. Anthropic), ruled that scanning books did not violate copyright. AI companies have embraced that decision, but it’s important to keep in mind the big picture. This was a class action lawsuit, and when Anthropic offered a $1.5 billion settlement, they were simultaneously dangling the promise of more than $100 million in legal fees in front of the attorneys pursuing the case.4 It’s not a big surprise that they took the money and did not appeal the book scanning decision. Judges in other cases have rejected the scanning analysis used in the Anthropic case. It will take years and probably the Supreme Court to settle the copyright issues.
The Anthropic settlement put hundreds of internal company documents into the public record. In those documents were the unpleasant details about Anthropic’s Project Panama, “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”5
Anthropic didn’t have to annihilate books; they didn’t have to put booksellers in the position of selling books to be destroyed. In fact, the man they hired to run Project Panama, Tom Turvey, had been one of the leaders of the largest non-destructive scanning operation ever attempted, Google Books’s program to digitize tens of millions of library books without harming the originals.6 With that legacy, he could have gone down in history as one of the greatest preservers of books in history. Instead, in a twist of fate or ego or greed worthy of Shakespeare, he is the public face of one of the largest libricides on record. Internal documents explain that “books will be cut to provide cost effective conversion.”7 A company spending billions of dollars for every data center opted not to spend a few extra million on non-destructive scanning. That decision follows Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei’s justification for pirating ebooks. The company “could in principle buy these things,” he wrote. But it would be “a huge legal/practice/business slog.”8
In the weekly updates on the progress of Project Panama, Turvey reported the velocity of destruction exceeding 100,000 books per week9, with millions of titles fed into the chopper over the life of the program.
The only consolation for book lovers is that the mission to destroy all the books in the world was an example of corporate grandiosity. Anthropic’s lawyers repeatedly insisted that the word book meant “written works that have been issued a 10- or 13-digit ISBN.”10 So they didn’t intend to buy and destroy one copy of every book ever published, just most of the books issued since the ISBN was introduced about 1970.
Printed books offer some of the best training data available for AI models. The manager of Anthropic’s token team11, Pranay Sangani, explained, “Natural language described versions of the universe are inherently useful in the pretraining process.”12 Anthropic launched six years after OpenAI, whose ChatGPT product took the world by storm. Anthropic planned to close the gap, despite “5x fewer resources,” by “adding higher quality data (particularly books that aren’t publicly available on the Internet)” to its AI training materials.13
Project Panama contacted Ingram, the largest new-book wholesaler, which declined to participate as destructive scanning “is too hot right now reputationally.” Anthropic decided to focus their scanning on used books, which had lower prices. “I have to think Ingram will come in higher as they are purchasing books at cost from pub[lisher]s,” an Anthropic employee wrote in the project reports.14 Still more shittiness here. Authors do not receive royalties for used books, which is yet another example of Anthropic’s corporate disdain for the writers who were essential for their business.
Most of Anthropic’s books came from mega-sellers like Better World Books, World of Books in the UK, and Thrift Books. Turvey concluded that used bookstores were too small to feed Anthropic’s voracious need for books to ingest. “Challenge might be volume for any particular bookstore… places like Strand or Powells have ~1M titles tops.” Turvey committed to not dismiss the idea of buying from used bookstores because Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Janel Thamkul, perhaps a supporter of used bookstores, chimed in that she was “super excited about this… :).”15 I could not find any records in the documents that Powell’s was ever contacted; nothing came of Anthropics’s outreach to The Strand.16
Judge Allsup’s now-disputed ruling that feeding scanned books to AI models was a fair use under copyright law opened the floodgates. Project Panama is now just the tip of the iceberg. Many other AI companies around the world are following Anthropic’s plan, acquiring vast quantities of books in secret for destructive scanning.
Beginning in the second half of last year, the insane AI demand for books overflowed the capacity of sources like Better World Books and Thrift Books. The first I heard about it was on the blog of Chuck Roberts, the owner of Wonder Book in Washington, DC. He asked in one post, “Will we move a million books? What a challenge. That would be close to twenty miles of books.”17 In another, he referred to his massive, semi-truck-sized orders as “The Book Rush of ’26. This century’s Gold Rush for printed matter.”
Roberts, a 46-year veteran18 of the used book business, continued, “Who’d have ever thought used books would be a desirable commodity for huge corporations?” He never reveals the destinations of his orders but he does cast his mind forward a thousand years to consider a future where “we invented our replacements, and what remains is deep-thinking machines drinking life from humming data centers.”19
By the start of 2026, AI’s hunt for books had finally trickled down to the level of small sellers. Much of the earlier buying was indiscriminate. Anything commercially published and relatively cheap would do. AI needed it all. This new round of book purchases seemed aimed at specific titles. The first orders to independent bookshops and online sellers started flowing in from Alibris, the sleepiest of all the book marketplaces. Booksellers received orders for 30 books overnight, as many as they typically sold on the site in a year. A few weeks after the sales geyser erupted, a bookseller reported that 23,000 orders had already been placed through Alibris, with more to come.20
AI purchasing expanded to Abebooks and Biblio. The buyers have names like Zoombooks, Trifinity, Project Blue Finch, Green Parrot, Red Sparrow, AutoBuy, Biblio FC. All the packages are going to logistics warehouses in the Midwest and Texas. These books tend to be higher priced than the average used books, with individual volumes selling for hundreds of dollars.
The sales put booksellers in an odd spot. AI companies have enlisted us in an effort to destroy books, pitting our belief in freedom of expression against our mission to preserve books. Lots of booksellers support Banned Book Week, a movement to draw attention to efforts to suppress books. When the USA Patriot Act authorized federal agents to obtain the borrowing records of library patrons and the reading habits of bookstore customers, librarians and (new) booksellers protested. Booksellers deleted their customer data and four librarians in Connecticut risked arrest when they defied a gag order to challenge the government.21 Booksellers have a fundamental belief in people’s right to books, even when we personally disagree with the content of the books or the beliefs of the customer. We have an abiding optimism that good ideas will win out over bad, at least in the long run. Now we have to decide if these principled stands still apply when the readers are machines, not people. The answer is not cut-and-dried.
I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of destroying books. People have a visceral response to it. Even people who don’t read are often reluctant to discard a book. More than any other medium, books store the collected wisdom, knowledge, history, and beliefs of humankind. Books have individual authors but they always reflect the spirit of their time, which is a shared creation. We all contribute to the language we speak and the culture we inhabit. The idea of a machine chewing through books strikes people as violence against humanity itself.
With 800 million new books sold each year in the US alone, we can’t keep them all.22 Books inevitably wear out, get damaged, or drift into obsolescence. They have to go somewhere. To put 800 million books into perspective, consider that eBay typically has 60 million book listings at any one time.23
Separating salable from unsalable books is inevitably part of the bookseller’s job. Often books pass through several layers of review. Many bookstores donate unwanted titles to thrift stores and library sales, and from there they go to large, bulk sellers. In 2019, the CEO of Thrift Books reported selling 25 million books per year, sourced from 300 million pounds of books.24 Assuming an average weight of 2 pounds per book, they sorted through 150 million books to find 25 million worth selling online. By the time a book hits a Dumpster, if that is its ultimate fate, it has likely been reviewed by several professionals who, based on the book’s age, subject matter, popularity, and condition, have determined there is no buyer for the book.
The books being destroyed by AI companies are exactly the opposite. They come from curated selections of titles that booksellers decided were worth saving. For every book on the shelf, each bookseller considered five or ten or even twenty other books and found them wanting. It can be disheartening to send the very books that we have spent so much effort saving to destructive scanning.
I did an informal survey of booksellers about how they felt about selling books to AI companies. The overriding sense of the comments was one of distaste. “I’d hate to be sending good books to be destroyed” is fairly typical of the responses. Another bookseller said the AI purchases were “ultimately an unsatisfying set of transactions.”
The sales, however, have been good for the book trade. The used book business is notorious for its slow rate of inventory turn. Normal retailers cull items that haven’t sold after a few months on the shelf. Booksellers regularly keep books for decades. One finally found vindication in that approach with the sales to AI companies.
We have always had a lot of slow-to-sell stock so it’s been somewhat of a redemption for our 50 years of (arguably) irresponsible buying habits. Eighty percent of books we’ve sold to the bulk buyers were books we’ve had online for 15 or 20 years, and were almost certainly headed to the Dumpster or donation at some point…
We’ve tried to be selective in what we sell. For example, we’ve cancelled orders for several books that are too rare/important/cool to potentially be destroyed….
I’m not sure what the online bookselling world will look like when it’s over, but it is nice to finally get to cash in a little on a bubble rather than get screwed yet again.
Another bookseller, in South Africa, wrote me and described the books going to AI companies.
The vast majority of the books had been shelf-sitters for many years, even decades. Had these orders not come along, I would almost certainly have had to dump volumes of Afrikaans poetry, apartheid history, obscure local histories, and heaps of cookery and military history titles. For many of us who live in isolated spots, with no walk-in trade, the sudden interest in our inventory has been more than welcome.
A few booksellers have refused to send any books to the AI guillotines. One told me, “I cancelled these orders and took a massive hit to my fulfillment rating. This isn’t bookselling.” Book Haven, a used bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, feels the same about AI book orders. “This is the exact opposite of what second-hand book selling is about. We’re in this business because we love books and we want to see them re-circulated so that more people can read them. We have therefore decided that we do not want to be part of this scheme.”
Most booksellers seem to be aiming for a middle ground, withholding books where their value as artifacts exceeds AI’s need for the text. The problem gets trickier with books where acquiring an artifact—the first edition or a copy signed by the author—is the only way to obtain the text, because it has not been reprinted or is scarce on the market.
One bookseller expressed concern about sending an uncommon work on Chicana anarchism to the AI companies for destructive scanning. The large language models behind AI chat bots already have an inherent bias toward content they find repeatedly in training materials. Withholding viewpoints outside of the mainstream only makes AI’s bias towards the mainstream even more pronounced. Should a bookseller save a Chicana anarchist work for a future human engaged in radical politics, or should she sacrifice it so that at least one AI model will have read a book on the subject? It’s hard to know the right answer. I wonder what the authors of obscure self-published and small press pamphlets and monographs would say. Some would tell the robots to pound sand. Others might be happy that the ideas in their books could potentially be available to anyone in the world through a chatbot.
I’m glad my inventory has evolved toward first editions and collectible books that the AI robots aren’t much interested in. I would be very conflicted about sending many of my books to be destroyed.
In recent days, the social media outrage machine has shifted its focus from the destruction of ordinary books to rare books. Elon Musk helped fan those flames when he wrote on X, “I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.”
I don’t think he actually meant rare books; I think he probably meant something more like out-of-print books. There’s no doubt that some of the books acquired by AI companies were first editions, author-signed copies, bibliographically significant, truly scarce, or had interesting marginalia—the sort of attributes that make a book collectible or of antiquarian interest. As much as I don’t like the destructive scanning undertaken by AI companies, especially since the cost of non-destructive scanning is nothing compared to the cost of building a hyperscale data center, I believe that any rare books that have been guillotined were purchased by accident. AI models only care about the text, not the physical object.
[Update: Just 5 hours after I posted this, an AI company ordered a Ray Bradbury book inscribed to the collector Tom Garner. The mailing address (I’m not making this up) is “SCAN PB c/o [Logistics Warehouse].” Couldn’t they, I don’t know, vibe code an AI agent to read the book descriptions to make sure they aren’t buying rare books? Of course, I’m going to cancel the order. Tom, were he alive today, will kill me if I sent a book off to be shredded.]
Like all gold rushes, this one will probably end soon. Eventually the big AI companies will have ingested everything they need, and I hope the quiet used and antiquarian book world will go back to normal. Many people are worried that AI will eliminate jobs. It won’t replace the idiosyncratic work flows of booksellers, at least not right away. It may well replace the jobs of the professionals who are the primary customers for our books. We may not be training the robots that will replace us, but we might be training the robots that replace our customers.
I also hope the end of scanning won’t be the end of the story for the AI companies. Out of fairness to authors, I want the view of Judge Chhabria to win in court. AI “products are expected to generate billions, even trillions, of dollars for the companies that are developing them,” he wrote. “If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”25 If AI companies do continue scanning into the future, they can also figure out how to digitize books without destroying them.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
Many social media posts about Project Panama use a background video showing book spines being guillotined. The video, by Book Rescuers in Tampa, Florida, shows how the spines and covers of obsolete books are removed and repurposed for craft projects while the paper inside can be recycled. It’s about not putting old books in landfills. Their Tik Tok is filled with many similar videos about turning old books into new things.
https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/ keeps track of them.
Legal fees totaling $101,561,111 were awarded to the authors’ lawyers. [PermaLink]
NB: Many of these court document links throw errors the first time they are clicked; yuo may need to try several times to get the pdf to load. The full list of documents in the Bartz v. Anthropic case can be found here; most are free to download. Project Panama mission statement: https://dn710207.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.560.26.pdf
See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/560/23/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/ , page 3, “considering current rate of ___k books scanned/week and __M in books scanned in 2025 until September.” There appear to be 3 digits before the k (thousands) and one or two before the M (millions).
https://dn710207.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.560.13.pdf, page 8. “Anthropic objects to this Interrogatory on grounds that the term books is vague and ambiguous; Anthropic interprets the word books to mean written works that have been issued a 10- or 13-digit ISBN.”
Ibid., p. 6.
https://dn710207.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.560.33.pdf . Ingram quote about reputation on p. 18; quote about being to high, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 26.
The Washington Post.
“Fire, Fraud and Frenzy” by Charles Roberts, Oct 24 , 2025. [PermaLink]
Chuck Roberts of Wonder Book started working at a bookstore in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in 1980. See the 1:40 mark of this interview.
“Big Book Biz” by Charles Roberts, April 10, 2026. [PermaLink]
The 23,000 number comes from a private email from a bookseller who talked to the Alibris employee in charge of managing the program.
About 56 million used books plus about 7 million in the antiquarian category.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260106234014/https://www.practicalecommerce.com/thrift-books-ceo-on-150-million-of-annual-used-book-sales . “We will buy maybe 300 million pounds of books this year.”
Scott,
Fantastic overview, the best I've read on the topic. Selfishly, you’ve saved me from having to attempt to write anything similar, which I wouldn’t have been able to do half as well. You do a great job with the numbers, which are illuminating.
The thought I have been wrestling with from the beginning, and still holding, is that these companies aren't singularly responsible for the destruction of "rare books." First, as discussed, the great majority aren't rare books to begin with (even if scarce). But more importantly, books are already being lost to time and apathy at a much higher rate. The biggest threat to books remains disinterest. A text can die at the hands of Anthropic, etc, or it can succumb to slow neglect stuffed away on a shelf or buried in some pile, after which it will meet the same end anyway; at least the former offers something of an honourable death, for there being the prospect of some use. I'm not saying I'm happy about either.
Outstanding overview of the current situation. One point that you did not push quite so hard is that many, even most of these books had large printings (they are, after all, post ISBN titles). Thus, even with this destruction by a few AI companies, a great many copies remain in circulation of the vast majority of these titles. It was duly noted that many are books that may have already been headed for recycle bins and/or forgotten on bookseller shelves. I think the concerns are overblown. I agree with MadBlue's comment...keeping obscure information preserved digitally may just be superior to there existing one, two, even five or 10 more copies of an obscure book gathering dust on someones shelves. I seriously doubt if AI is often chewing up the last existing copy of anything. And if there was a fire, flood or catastrophe...the information is preserved. But yes, preserving the intact copy IS the best solution.