Secondhand Book Sales Surge as AI Training Demands Boom
Something mysterious has been happening in the world of used books. Independent sellers have noticed a strange pattern: a single bulk order can fill a shop's inventory faster than a normal week. Stuart Manley from Barter Books in Northumberland says he has never seen anything like it in 30 years of selling pre‑owned fiction.
The court battle over books
The rise in secondhand book sales can be traced back to a 2025 US court ruling. Judge William Alsup found that using books purchased in this way to train AI software was not a copyright violation. The decision followed a lawsuit against a generative‑AI firm, Anthropic, by three authors. The judge described the AI use as "exceedingly transformative" and therefore allowed under US law.
Court documents leaked last month revealed that Anthropic also destroys the books once they are scanned, a process described internally as Project Panama – the aim to "destructively scan all the books in the world". Anthropic asserts that it buys and refines books for training but does not destroy rare or antiquarian titles. Yet the sheer volume and variety of bulk orders – from obscure Latin texts to cowboy stories – feed the argument that AI demand is the root cause.
Destructive scanning
Destructive scanning involves shipping books to facilities where they can be digitised at scale. A common approach is to remove the spine so all pages are captured quickly, after which the remainder is recycled. The name "Project Panama" has sparked curiosity among sellers, but whether it includes other AI firms remains unclear.
Experts note the wide range of texts involved. Given AI's appetite for fresh data, rare books provide new language patterns that can improve model performance. Professor Emily Hudson of Oxford University warns that UK copyright law requires explicit permission from the copyright owner for all copying activities, whether for training or publication.
Ethical concerns
Book sellers face a dilemma. While the bulk sales bring a welcome boost, the idea of books being destroyed worries many. Derek Walker of McNaughtan's in Edinburgh cautions that if a one‑off edition were to be bought for destruction, it would be a severe loss to cultural heritage.
Yet Stuart Manley argues that recycling books is a practical solution – especially for titles that no longer have a market. "The world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code," he says. "Some books have lain unsold for 20 years; a bulk sale gives them a new purpose before they are destroyed."
Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world’s top tech stories and trends.
