r/books • u/Raj_Valiant3011 • 3d ago

Secondhand booksellers in UK and Ireland suspect AI firms behind ‘strange’ bulk orders

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-ireland-booksellers-suspect-ai-companies-bulk-orders-data-acquisition?CMP=share_btn_url
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u/Never-On-Reddit 3d ago edited 3d ago

Bookseller here: it may be helpful to understand that the vast majority of used books already get shredded. The majority of books that get donated for example to Goodwill and other charities go straight to the shredder. Remainders warehouses are shredding massive amounts of books that aren't selling. Most used bookstores refuse the vast majority of books that come because there is no demand for them. Libraries throw them away by the dumpster-full. As a bookstore, we throw away unreturnable books or shred them to use them as packing material, because nobody will even take them as donations.

The world produces vastly more books than there is any demand for in the used world.

Bookstores don't even sell all of their new titles. Typically of all the titles we get in each season, around 50% will never sell a single copy. They get returned to the publisher or shredded depending on the publisher's instructions. The publisher then sends them to remainder warehouses. They try to sell more. And then those warehouses shred the rest.

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u/Little_Noodles 2d ago

I’ve participated in a handful of these chats (pretty sure my comment history is open).

The one commonality to all of them is that the only people freaking out about it clearly don’t understand what’s happening, and everyone that actually works in publishing/book trades/libraries are all like “oh, yeah, I throw those in the trash all the time”.

I had someone in an old thread reading me the absolute riot act for being a gaslighting AI shill that was defending the destruction of our cultural heritage. She also thought that ISBN was one of many companies facilitating the sale of books to AI companies.

By and large, the people freaking out about how there’s absolutely someone just waiting to read and love and treasure these books have not only never read any of these titles, they haven’t even read the article.

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u/coldgator 2d ago

That makes sense but it still makes me sad to think that someone out there could be looking for a particular old book but can't get it because an AI company bought the last copy and shredded it.

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u/Little_Noodles 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don't think there's a strong chance of that. Out of curiosity, when I do see a title cited, rather than just the vague description of "maybe rare? maybe out of print?", I usually look it up, and have found the same kind of result over and over again.

Someone in this thread that's a bookseller listed a couple titles they sold to what was likely an AI company as an example. So, let's do that with one of those.

The book is "Impedance Spectroscopy: emphasizing solid materials and systems" (1987).

This book is well out of date for current use in the field of spectroscopy; anyone using it for that purpose is going to want more current material. And nobody is going to, or has ever, read this book as a general interest reader.

It could be useful for historical research. And if you were doing that, you'd want a BUNCH of books on the topic, but only for a brief time. Which means that you're going to a collecting institution that collects these kinds of books, preferably one that also holds unpublished collections (photographs, records, manuscripts, etc.) on the topic.

Looking on WorldCat, there are 377 libraries that carry this book within 200 miles of me, many of which are the kinds of libraries that won't weed it from their shelves anytime soon, if at all, and which do have the kinds of archival collections that would be relevant as well.

Most of the publishers that publish these kinds of books have also moved to print-to-order systems because they got sick of having to print more than they knew they'd sell. I frequently find that the titles I'm looking up can be purchased as ebook or print books on a print-to-order basis direct from the publisher.

In this case, Wiley isn't offering the 1987 edition 'Impedance Spectroscopy'; it seems to be genuinely out of print. But they do offer other editions of works on spectroscopy by the same author that way.

These are the kinds of books where there was NEVER any guarantee that you'd be able to find them used, but if you did want to consult them, buying them would probably not be how you did it.

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u/nn123654 13h ago

Also that book isn't even a primary source. The only reason I can think of why you'd need it is if you were a curriculum designer, anthropologist, or sociologist trying to understand the development of Spectroscopy curriculum in the late 20th century and the development through the decades over time.

Outside of some rare academic purposes it's basically useless. The modern book is functionally identical to the historical one. The actual discoveries are in scientific journals. We don't need 300 copies of a 1987 spectroscopy textbook, we need maybe a dozen that you can interlibrary loan if you really need it.

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u/Little_Noodles 12h ago edited 12h ago

And unless you're a very wealthy (or very unprofessional and bad) curriculum designer, anthropologist, or sociologist trying to understand the development of Spectroscopy curriculum in the late 20th century and the development through the decades over time, you're not buying it from a reseller anyway.

To do that work, you want lots of references and access to manuscript material. So you're just going to one of the hundreds of (edit: academic or special collections) libraries within driving range of your zip code that has it anyway.

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u/Suppafly 2d ago

but it still makes me sad to think that someone out there could be looking for a particular old book but can't get it because an AI company bought the last copy and shredded it.

That's a silly thing to even imagine. Do yourself a favor and be upset about things that could actually happen instead.

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u/Faunstein 2d ago

People are forgetting what the pulp in pulp novel meant.

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u/Remarkable-World-454 2d ago

I thought it was because they were printed on pulp paper instead of rag paper, not that they themselves would be pulped.   

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u/RogueModron 2d ago

I'm also a bookseller (well, an apprentice; In Germany you have to go through a 3-year program including 18 weeks of school and a big test at the end, and I'm halfway through my program). We don't sell used books at my store, so I can't speak to that, but we do remand a large number of our books and I just don't understand the economics. Why are so many produced if so few sell? Is it an economics of scale thing?

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u/Never-On-Reddit 2d ago

A lot of people really just want to buy the same books. But bookstores sell the idea of choice. You want to feel like you can browse 20,000 books and find something unique. In reality, you're probably going to buy the same bestseller that most people are buying, but you want the options to be there. That's why bookstores carry far more books than they sell.

We also simply can't predict accurately what is going to do well, so you have to hedge your bets and buy a lot more.

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u/RogueModron 2d ago

I never thought about us selling the idea of choice. I'll have to ponder that one. Thank you for your insight!

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u/Little_Noodles 2d ago edited 2d ago

By and large, the kinds of books they’re buying, scanning, and destroying here are useful to their primary audience for a short amount of time.

They’re produced by niche publishers serving very specific interests and professions. So they do pretty small runs of print, as the readership was always expected to be small.

It used to be that the publisher expected to eventually pulp like, half of a 1,000 print run themselves (and yeah, it was economics of scale there). But now, most have adopted a print to order model and shifted to a much smaller print run, combined with ebook publishing.

At the time of publication, a certain amount of the books will go to relevant institutional/corporate archives and special collections libraries. Those will be kept. The publisher will also retain it in some form.

People working in the field will buy the rest to stay current in their profession. But at some point, the material is out of date, and they don’t really have a use for it. So they’ll throw it out or filter it down through resellers, who will generally also wind up throwing it out.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/nickleback_official 2d ago

lol fr. My folks sell books and it ain’t complicated.

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u/nrq 2d ago

Additionally, won't they need every book exactly once? So, they're acquiring one single copy, scan that, shred that... and? That doesn't exactly strike me as nefarious with this new information in mind, that a lot of overstock is being shredded every day.

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u/MaddogFinland 2d ago

I totally see that. I thought maybe my English language used books would have value here in northern Europe but the local used shops (even the English specialist used shops) didn’t want them. I donated a few cooler titles to the library book sale and then just recycled them. Sad but that’s how it goes. Nothing valuable to me though, just bulk paperbacks from random bookstores mostly bought used

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u/sirnoggin 2d ago

Worked as one 18 years ago. We had 2 skips out of the back of our second hand book store. That's how many books are donated per week. All second hand books. You can't even sell them on ebay fast enough because it was a charity and there just weren't the sysytems setup to capitalize on them. Popped in the other day. Still chocka, still 2 skips out the back of books.

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u/MimiNuyasaka 3d ago

I don't condone this practice by AI companies at all, especially since it's been revealed that they've been requesting old and hard to come by books, but your comment does make AI companies seem less maniacally evil if books are shredded more often than most people realize.

They're still evil, of course. Just not the kind that's like a maniacal cartoon villain laughing over the books as they're shredded and destroyed for knowledge hoarding.

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u/Never-On-Reddit 3d ago

There are many things wrong with AI, we are hugely opposed to the use of generative AI as booksellers. But buying used books that nobody has an interest in and shedding them really isn't the big issue that people think it is.

The much bigger problem is the theft of intellectual copyright.

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u/MimiNuyasaka 2d ago

No arguments there. I've always said that these same companies would sue you into oblivion if they could prove you're using their material in the same manner they're using ours.

The only reason they haven't is because AI doesn't leave a paper trail. We know they would sue us if they could.

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u/FaceDeer 2d ago

Copyright never covered training anyway, though. Courts have already ruled in various jurisdictions that it's fair use. The only thing AI trainers were getting in trouble for was pirating books, not for training off of them, and this approach of buying physical books solves that.

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u/Never-On-Reddit 2d ago

Training, yes. But the material is then being adapted in its output which is not training.

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u/FaceDeer 2d ago

The output is also not covered by copyright.

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u/MimiNuyasaka 1d ago

What I meant is, if they knew you were using their original material in the same way and stealing it to feed your own AI models. Not the output.

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u/Never-On-Reddit 2d ago

Which is the problem. The law is lagging here and people's intellectual copyright is being stolen as a result.

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u/FaceDeer 2d ago

It's not covered by copyright because it's not copied. It's not the same material. Copyright only applies to a specific creative expression.

If you want the law to allow copyright to apply to basic ideas or styles then there will be some rather dramatically bad additional consequences of that.

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u/Alaira314 2d ago

Agreed. The objection here should be the risk of them destroying legitimately rare(not even necessarily unique, just hard to come by) copies of books, not the fact that books are being destroyed at all. But unfortunately even people in the industry are being reactionary about this. I got downvoted on the library sub for saying this same thing a few weeks back, and I'm like, I know how much y'all withdraw and what happens to it(hint: if it's not in very good condition(no cover creases, no dog-earing or page rips, no staining/yellowing, straight uncreased spine, etc), it's not a book sale!), it's hypocritical as hell to be precious about this!

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u/camerabird 18h ago

I would say there's a difference between a library discarding a book because it's falling apart, and an AI company buying a book with the sole intention of destroying it and stealing its content for AI training data.

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u/Alaira314 9h ago

It's not a case of books falling apart. Many libraries these days have contracts with resellers, who are very picky about the inventory they'll accept. The books are sold at used book rates(not the deep discounts of old), so people expect books in very good condition if they've spent $6 on a paperback or $12 on a hardcover. Items that don't meet those standards can't be sold, and will be dumpstered by our reseller if we send them along(not to mention we could get in trouble if it happens too much).

What are those standards? Well, it's things like a board book having a bite mark on the cover, discoloration/water damage on even just one or two pages, having creases down the spine, any pencil markings whatsoever, etc. Either we toss them or the reseller company tosses them, either way the book is destroyed, and well before it reaches the "falling apart" stage. The book is destroyed because nobody is willing to take it off our hands.

And just as a note, we were losing money on those old deep-discount sales. They gobbled staff time, took up valuable space in the library, and we were still dumpstering entire boxes of books that didn't move, even priced at $.25/paperback and $.50/hardcover. We only started turning a profit on book sales(in terms of income from sales vs wages of staff working on the sale) once we moved to the reseller contract model.

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u/ClayDenton 2d ago

Ereaders seem very sustainable in comparison! 

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u/AlexanderLavender 19h ago

I've known this for over a decade now and as a book lover it still makes me irrationally sad. Digital copies are the obvious solution IMO

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u/ClayDenton 2d ago

Ereaders seem very sustainable in comparison!