AI training pushed used booksellers into destructive scanning

AI companies are buying secondhand books by the pallet to destructively scan them for training data, one UK bookseller says. That's turned bookshops into an unlikely supply chain for AI training text, with order volumes that used booksellers have never seen from ordinary readers.

Stuart Manley, who runs Barter Books in England, told the BBC that a single recent order matched what his shop normally sells in a week.

The mechanism is a 2025 US court ruling that training an AI model on lawfully purchased physical books doesn't infringe copyright. Buying a used book and scanning it costs less than licensing the same text from a publisher. The ruling turned pallets of secondhand books into training-data supply.

Destructive scanning means cutting the spine off a book, imaging every page at industrial speed, and recycling what's left. Court documents from the Anthropic case name this effort Project Panama, with a stated goal to scan every book in the world this way. The filings describe a literal inventory target, not a figure of speech.

The BBC report doesn't say how many other shops are seeing the same pattern, or how large Project Panama's total book count runs. Court filings do confirm the goal: destructively scan all of the books in the world.