AI Companies Are Buying and Destroying Used Books

earlier this year something strange began to happen in the world of used books a number of used booksellers were seeing really sharp increases in sales some of them would get 20 or 30 orders one book at a time but all from the same buyer within the course of a day or two our colleague melissa corn is a deputy bureau chief for the wall street journal's media team others would get one order for 50 books or 100 books and these are much bigger volume sales than they were used to some of them didn't really even know how to ship that many books at once they had never needed to before and what kinds of books were being purchased first of all some of these book titles the fact that these are books at all is kind of incredible and the fact that somebody is seeking them out to buy is just as incredible so we've got cultures of glass architecture ah indeed slow wine 2012 a year in the life of italy's vineyards and wines you know from 14 years ago real important knowledge there women in television news revisited i wonder when they were visited the first time one of my favorites was marriage litigation in medieval england wow so we're not talking like harry potter series being bought in boston or something like that we're talking about a lot of in bulk here no the books being ordered were mostly non-fiction about completely unrelated topics and the orders were being shipped out not to individual customers but to warehouses and did the sellers know who these buyers were no it was a mystery to the booksellers who was actually getting these books at the end of the day welcome to the journal our show about money business and power i'm jessica mendoza it's tuesday september 8th coming up on the show the mystery that's tearing up the used book industry you this episode is presented by intuit credit karma relaxation doesn't always look like spa days or fluffy pillows sometimes it's simpler than that it's when those pesky tasks you don't have time for like hunting down your credit card perks are handled for you like how card optimizer from intuit credit karma brings your card details together in one simple place so tracking rewards and redeeming benefits is actually easy you deserve less and more ah intuit credit karma download the app to get started this episode is brought to you by indeed the right hire can make or break your company especially if you're a small business and relying on luck to find that person isn't really the best strategy but you know what is using indeed sponsored jobs you can use it to boost your job post to make sure it reaches more people with the right talents certification location and more sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are 95 more likely to report a higher than non-sponsored jobs spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes less stress less time more results when you need the right person to cut through the chaos this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs and listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about indeed here indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply hiring now then this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs the used book industry is made up of a smorgasbord of shops and sellers some have storefronts some sell out of their home some sell online through third-party websites it's a sprawling unpredictable market mostly fueled by people like me who simply love a good book the booksellers are buying these books you know in the hopes that somebody comes along and has a particular interest in this list of books and they're going to be able to buy them and they're little niche of the universe it's always been a tough industry it is thin margins the booksellers they would sometimes get you know one or two orders a day one or two orders a week depending on how big their inventory was so when these booksellers started getting these mystery bulk orders were they happy at first i mean these were changing their financial circumstances significantly right so some have told me that they were doubling their revenue thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in new sales coming in words started to spread about these strange orders and they became the talk of the town in bookseller circles booksellers meet at antiquarian book fairs around the world i love that they have email list serves there are message boards on the marketplace sites on reddit and some started posting you know hey i'm getting a lot of orders from this particular company anyone else notice it did any sort of patterns start to emerge yes the booksellers as they compared notes realized a lot of these destinations were the same named companies that they had never heard of before and now all of a sudden we're doing these bulk buys many of the buyers went by unusual names often it was some combination of a color and a bird so red sparrow and blue finch and green parrot project uh one of the booksellers was like it sounds like out of a 70s spy novel or something one bookseller decided to solve the mystery herself and of course every spy novel requires gadgets i was talking to my sister telling her about the whole situation and she said oh why don't you put a tracker on one of your shipments this bookseller is a self-proclaimed weird book specialist based in the pacific northwest and so a light bulb went off in my head and you know we like a week passed or something like that and i just could not stop thinking about that idea so she went and bought a couple of tracking devices turns out there are a lot of options online she chose a tracker that was slim about the size and shape of a credit card and i also went out and got special tape that was removable because i didn't want to damage the book the next time a bulk order came in she slid one of the small trackers into an envelope and taped it under the book jacket i was very i i was kind of uh nervous let's put it that way just nervous about the whole thing doing anything covertly like that i'm not used to doing things like that the bookseller was worried that she was very nervous about the whole thing and she was violating the terms of the sale but she did it anyway in two different books for two different orders then she sat at her computer and watched the first book went to a warehouse in ohio and sat there for weeks then it headed to an industrial complex in illinois when she looked up the address she saw it matched a location for a company with a large book scanning business a kind of place where books get digitized and she saw it matched a location for a company with a large book scanning business a kind of place where books get digitized and often destroyed that's where she thinks the book died the second book went to a warehouse in wisconsin then it took a trip to las vegas specifically to an intersection with at least two amazon facilities so it was like okay i think i think i know what's going on here the last ping from that tracker came from mexico at the site of a recycled paper manufacturer i'm convinced that my experiment showed that it really was going to some kind of ai operation where they scanned and destroyed the books what was your initial reaction when you realized that the books were probably being destroyed yeah well you know i was facing reality that okay i was going to buy a book and i was going to buy a book yeah well you know i was going to buy a book and i was going to buy a book i have to decide now how to how to deal with this information how booksellers are grappling with the fate of their books is next this message is brought to you by apple card with apple card you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases like groceries merch or tickets to the game plus it can be used anywhere mastercard is accepted no matter your team no matter where 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And it's shortcodes by a mile. Lease a shortcode today at usshortcodes.com slash podcast. The bookseller we talked to confirmed a suspicion among many in the used book industry that the mysterious orders had something to do with AI. And that suspicion didn't come out of nowhere. Here's Melissa again. In January of this year, a number of court filings were unsealed in the case of a bunch of authors against Anthropic in a copyright infringement suit. The lawsuit against Anthropic focused mainly on how the company was downloading millions of digital books without paying for them, which is illegal. It's pirating. But during that investigation, it came to light that Anthropic was also buying physical books. And they were buying physical copies of books in bulk as part of a big secret project. Project Panama was the codename. Through Project Panama, according to reporting from the Washington Post, Anthropic was training its AI models with the information inside the pages of physical books. So we already knew that AI companies train their models, right, with what's available on the internet. Right. But I guess, like, not everything is online. Right. If you want your AI model to really have all of the information that's out there, they have to go analog for some of it. So Anthropic was buying millions of books, hardcover, paperback, whatever. And, you know, essentially they internally said, you know, we want all of the books. We want to eat everything. Court records from the Anthropic lawsuit contained images of warehouses full of books, rows upon rows of them. Each one potentially on its way to be scanned and turned into a digital copy that the AI could learn off of. Book scanning happens in one of two ways. One is called non-destructive, and it is a little more time-consuming and labor-intensive, where one page is scanned, the page is flipped, the next page is scanned, page is flipped. Which, if you're trying to do that for millions of books, is, you know, would take— Takes a long time, I imagine. Decades. I don't even know, right? Right. The other option is much faster, and it's done using a tool called a book guillotine. Essentially, the machine cuts the spine of the book off. It separates the pages from the binding and then feeds the pages, the loose pages, into a scanner. And that can happen extraordinarily quickly, right? Like, you are ripping or slicing apart a book. And that is the most efficient way of doing high-volume scanning. And that's what Anthropic was doing to the books. Killing books? Not necessarily the best PR move a company could make. And Anthropic took a lot of heat when it came out. An Anthropic spokesperson said sourcing books is a widely used approach for AI training, and that, quote, none of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books. Here's the thing. In a logical paradox that seems straight out of Fahrenheit 451, the destruction of the books was actually Anthropic's saving grace. A judge determined that in part because the physical book was being destroyed after it was scanned, what Anthropic was doing with Project Panama was legal, according to copyright law. They bought a book, turned it into something digital. They were not adding another copy to the market. They were replacing the print copy with digital content for their own use. And a lot of AI companies later took that to mean, as long as we're buying the book, it's okay, particularly if we are then destroying the book. Multiple AI companies are now ordering books from used booksellers all around the world. That's recently been confirmed by the tech news site 404 Media, along with Melissa's reporting and the evidence obtained by the booksellers' trackers. And this amounts to a new phase in the book-goblin game. AI destroying rare books, weird books, books in unique languages, you name it. And this new phase has made a lot of people angry. Big AI is literally lighting our books on fire. I'm pretty sure this is one of the worst things AI companies have ever done. The worst part is that some of these books are super rare and hard to find. We're looking at Orwell's 1984, in action. As a book lover, I also don't love the idea of thousands of books getting ripped up, especially rare ones. But it turns out books actually get destroyed all the time. There are a lot of other kind of parties in the book universe that do destroy books at large scale on a regular basis, including publishers, right? They think a book is going to be an absolute bestseller. It does not. They don't sell well. They have many, many copies sitting in warehouses. At some point, many determine, whatever, I can't sell this off to the recycling plant. And there, the books get, you know, shredded, pulped, turned into other paper products, like toilet paper. So sad. You'll think about that next time you go to the bathroom. Honestly. But now that AI companies are involved, a lot of booksellers are feeling totally, totally torn over how to respond, including the bookseller we spoke to. How are you grappling with this as a bookseller? I went back and forth about it. First, it was this sort of revulsion. Like, you know, you don't want the books that you carefully selected and sold to someone to be destroyed. But on the other hand, there's so many books in the, I mean, millions and millions and millions that you can't really get very sentimental about each book. Fair enough. Uh-huh. You know, I know that books get destroyed all the time. Is there a line that you've drawn as to, like, what you'll sell to buyers who you suspect are probably AI companies? Yeah, there is, there is a line. And it's, you know, if it is something that I have identified as a rare book, I'll just reject the order. I mean, there's, yeah. But that hasn't really come to me. It hasn't really come up yet, so. To be fair, some of the books being bought by AI companies may be obscure, but they're not all rare cultural artifacts. So facing reality, it's okay in my mind that they are being destroyed as long as they're not rare. It's just a little bit uncomfortable that you're facilitating it. I think the kind of moral conundrum that a lot of the booksellers find themselves in of, you know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. But I think the kind of moral conundrum that a lot of the booksellers find themselves in is that they are in this business because they love books. They love connecting a book to a book lover. And, you know, making that sale, sure, but also helping somebody fill out their collection or find a book that they've been looking for for 20 years and had some great emotional meaning to them. So for them to have to face this idea that they are potentially destroying a book that may matter to somebody is hard. But, again, there's the economics of it. Some of the booksellers who Melissa talked to are just happy for the increase in sales. Others worry they're seeding their own demise, feeding a new technology that could replace the need for books altogether at a time when fewer people are reading. Is this going to completely demolish the used book industry? No. Is this going to destroy the antiquarian, truly high-end rare book industry? Probably not. But it will affect the economics of used book selling for at least a little while. How big of a risk is it, really, that some rare books are lost forever because of this practice? If one AI company is buying one copy of a fairly uncommon book, that's one thing. If 20 AI companies are doing it, all of a sudden, having 20 books on the market doesn't feel like a very big cushion. So, it does depend on the book, obviously. It depends on how many copies are being gobbled up. So, it is tough for some to swallow, but at the same time, there is an acknowledgement that the way people consume information is changing. Yeah, it's really interesting because a book is information in a very particular format. And even though you can make the argument, and I think very fairly, that AI is offering its own kind of knowledge and its own kind of information, but it does take away from the feeling that you get when you open a book for the first time. I mean, I have to say, I kind of love, there's a great used bookstore a few blocks away from where I live. I love wandering it. I love buying a book. And every once in a while, seeing some note written in the, in a margin and like you just makes you wonder who owned this before and what's their story and why and yeah there's a magic to it that's different there is there's some magic to it that's all for today tuesday september 8th the journal is a co-production of spotify and the wall street journal if you like our show follow us on spotify or wherever you get your podcasts we're out every weekday afternoon thanks for listening see you tomorrow the viorey core short moves with you with everyday versatility and classic athletic fit it's the one short for everything your day brings invest in your happiness and get 20 off your first purchase at viorey.com slash 420 that's v-u-o-r-i.com slash k-o-r-e-2-0 exclusions apply visit the website for full terms and conditions have you heard that mcdonald's spicy chicken mcnuggets made with spicy tempura and a blend of aged cayenne are back remember to grab a few extra napkins for a limited time at participating mcdonald's