AI Companies Are Buying Secondhand Books by the Pallet to Destructively Scan Them — Booksellers Report Single Orders Worth a Normal Week
BBC reporting picked up on HN at 68 points and 71 comments: UK used booksellers are seeing a boom traced to AI training-data acquisition. Stuart Manley of Barter Books said a single recent order matched a normal week's revenue, and David Tobin of Walden Books in north London reported the same. The mechanism is a 2025 US court ruling that training on lawfully purchased physical books is not infringement — which made buying and destructively scanning used books cheaper than licensing. Court documents from the Anthropic case named the effort 'Project Panama,' with a stated goal to 'destructively scan all of the books in the world'; destructive scanning means cutting the spine off, imaging the pages at industrial speed, and recycling the remains. The market response is that the legal path to text data now runs through pallets of physical books.
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