Secondhand booksellers in the UK and Ireland report a recent flurry of large, oddball orders from buyers in the US, Canada, continental Europe and the UK, a pattern replicated in the US, Australia and Europe. Orders that began about three months ago do not follow usual themed groupings; Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Alnwick said he sold “hundreds” of miscellaneous books to three buyers for about £4,000, including an Estonian translation of John le Carré’s The Mission Song, a specific imprint of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and the October 1983 edition of Warship magazine. Jim Shaughnessy of MW Books in Claregalway and David Gower-Spence of BookLovers of Bath described similarly large, varied purchases, with Gower-Spence receiving around 200 books between May and July. One anonymous UK bookseller said different buyer aliases deliver to the same freight-warehouse postcode near Heathrow and has sold about 6,000 books to similar buyers since January, with purchasers paying “top whack.” The spate has fuelled booksellers’ speculation that AI companies are buying used books to scan their contents before pulping them, a concern underscored by recent reporting that Anthropic spent millions buying books for data acquisition. Zoom Books, a Canada-based recycler named by other reporting, has been contacted for comment by the Guardian. Booksellers say the pattern is disrupting the secondhand market because the selections make no sense against normal market trends.
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