‘If people are really bothered… maybe they should buy more books too’

SECOND-hand book dealers have reported a boom in sales of titles “nobody wanted” by mysterious agents believed to be acting on behalf of US tech giants.

Independent book dealers have told Extra that they have received hundreds of orders from overseas companies for obscure books on niche subjects over the past three months.

The companies buying the books from online catalogues – not in bulk but one by one – are believed to be feeding the demands of artificial intelligence language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

The books being bought have often sat on shop shelves for years, some decades.

At Any Amount of Books, which has been a fixture of Charing Cross Road since the 1980s, they include A Practitioner’s Guide to the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers 2012/2013, Adhesive Wafer Seals: A Transient Victorian Phenomenon, Bridging Souls and Human Minds: A History of the Telephone in Finland, and Adam and Eve on a Raft by Ron Goulart (below).

Michael Cubey, who runs the shop, said: “It’s a hard time to be a retailer at the moment, so a sale is welcome. It’s culturally very interesting, if people are really bothered about these companies buying lots of books, maybe they should buy more books too.”

The patterns of the purchases often made little sense, he said. “There’s no way that anyone can make money out of this, it’s got to be someone with a lot of money, and the only people with a lot of money at the moment are AI companies.

“The first order we got was very large for us. They’re old books; quite a lot of them have languished on shelves.

“There were a number of different companies, but I’m sure it’s the same organisation because it’s the same pattern and they all go to similar addresses. It’s not like someone’s buying the last copy and destroying it. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing.”

But he added: “There’s obviously a separate conversation around AI and whether that’s dystopian – it’s a terrible thing for all sorts of reasons – just genuinely making people more stupid. But I don’t think that the buying books is particularly bad.”

The BBC has reported a court ruling in the United States that revealed the process “includes removing a book’s spine so all the pages can be scanned rapidly”.

Other second-hand booksellers told Extra they have also been getting mysterious orders. At Walden Books in Camden David Tobin, who has run the store for decades, said the pattern only began this year.

“This is not positive for me or the world, it’s become this giant mill grinding up knowledge. It doesn’t bode very well for the future,” he said.

The dystopian image of a book-consuming knowledge machine was not lost on the bookseller, who referenced the fictional regime in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. And, he said, while authoritarian governments “find the written word a threat,” in this case “it’s almost as if it’s become meaningless; they want the words themselves”.

Brian Lake at Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers in Bloomsbury told Extra: “We’ve only had one order from the AI behemoths, for one of our old printed catalogues.”

Lake, who has sold many rare titles and manuscripts over decades, said: “A colleague had an order for a random selection of books worth several thousand pounds, he refused to sell.”

He added: “If people haven’t woken up to the threat of AI yet they never will.”