Canadian booksellers worry about AI book shredding amid ‘suspicious’ bulk orders

Canadian used book sellers are trying to figure out how to deal with “mysterious” bulk orders as suspicions grow that AI companies are buying up old books to scan them for AI training and then dispose of them.

This concern stems from a U.S. copyright lawsuit brought against the notable AI giant Anthropic, which revealed the company was spending millions on books, chopping off the spines to quickly scan the pages, using the data to train its large language model Claude, and then discarding the remains.

According to an investigation by 404 Media, large orders of books are also being sent to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas to undergo what was referred to as “destructive scanning” for LLM training.

According to CBC, physical books, specifically those written prior to ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, are in demand by AI companies because LLMs degrade when trained on their own output, so they need to be fed content free of AI-generated material.

Several bookstore owners who spoke to CBC said they noticed AI companies were personally reaching out to them to request large bulk book orders.

One example is Peter Sellers, a proprietor at Sellers & Newel bookstore in Toronto. Sellers told CBC that around June, he started getting “very suspicious” calls about bulk orders, and even received a message on LinkedIn from an Innodata representative saying they were “currently looking to purchase large volumes of secondhand books” and “exploring potential sourcing partners.”

Patrick Hempelmann, who owns BMV Books in Toronto, also told CBC that a company called Zoom Books, out of Pitt Meadows, B.C., which resells and recycles secondhand books, started placing bulk orders about six months ago for mainly technical books with small print runs. These books included old medical texts or graduate student-level math and physics books that had been sitting on shelves for a while.

Interestingly, CBC noted that Zoom Books’ chief growth officer, Reed Pannell, was a business development director at a U.K.-based company, World of Books, which was listed in court documents obtained by the Washington Post as one of the companies selling to Anthropic for its destructive scanning project.

Source: CBC News