TL;DR

Secondhand bookshops across Britain and Ireland have been fielding large orders from buyers whose selections follow no discernible theme, paid at full price with no discount sought. The trade suspects AI companies acquiring text to scan. One anonymous seller has shipped 6,000 books to such buyers since January, and a delivery postcode used by several of them resolves to freight warehouses close to Heathrow.

What the orders look like

Stuart Manley, who co-owns Barter Books in Alnwick, has been receiving them for three months. Normally an order clusters around a subject — sport, motoring — and these do not. A single recent request took in an Estonian translation of a le Carré novel, an Anne Brontë title from one particular imprint, and a specific 1983 issue of a naval monthly. Three buyers between them have taken hundreds of books off him, worth around £4,000.

At MW Books in Claregalway, Jim Shaughnessy describes the pattern as sporadic and presumably machine-driven, spanning eighteenth-century African agricultural implements at one end and, at the other, biographies of racing drivers from the 1950s. Across May to July, David Gower-Spence at BookLovers of Bath took orders for roughly 200 books from buyers other sellers also named.

The identities behind them are hard to penetrate even for experienced dealers. One buyer, a Canadian firm styling itself North America’s leading book recycling company, recurs across accounts.

Why anyone would want them

Anthropic was reported this year to have put tens of millions into buying books, cutting off their spines to scan the contents, then recycling the remains. The company says sourcing books is common practice across the industry and that none of its acquisition programmes destroys rare or antiquarian volumes.

The logic favours older stock: text published before 2022 is uncontaminated by machine-generated writing, and much of it never went online. Not all the evidence fits — some requested titles, including works long out of copyright, are freely available already.

The trade takes the hit

This matters commercially, not just curiously. Buyers paying top price without haggling are pulling stock out of a market that runs on thin margins and slow turnover, and sellers cannot tell whether they are supplying a collector or a shredder. Booksellers describe it as disrupting normal trade because the buying pattern bears no relation to market demand.

Looking forward

Orders arrive through marketplaces including Biblio and Amazon’s AbeBooks, neither of which has commented. Those platforms are the only point where buyer identity could realistically be surfaced — and the only lever a bookseller has, short of refusing the sale.