Key Takeaways
- Physical books are valued not only for their text but also as cultural artefacts that tell stories about food, society and human experience.
- Generative‑AI companies have been reported to buy second‑hand books, cut off their spines, scan the pages and pulp the remains—a practice dubbed “destructive scanning.”
- A U.S. court ruled that Anthropic’s destructive scanning of books constitutes “transformative use” and is therefore lawful under current copyright law.
- Australian secondhand booksellers have received unusually large, price‑insensitive orders from a Canadian firm called Zoom Books, raising suspicions that their stock may be feeding the AI supply chain.
- While some sellers see bulk sales as a financial boon, others warn that destroying rare or one‑of‑a‑kind volumes erases irreplaceable cultural heritage.
- Both Anthropic and Zoom Books deny directly destroying rare books, but they acknowledge that sourcing used texts for AI training is widespread in the industry.
The Melbourne Rare Book Fair and the Value of the Physical Object
At Melbourne University’s Wilson Hall, Tim White lines up carefully dust‑jacketed books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves on temporary shelves, preparing his stall for the weekend’s Melbourne Rare Book Fair. “Sometimes books tell you more than the content,” he says, as he arranges the items. White, who runs the independent shop Books for Cooks, emphasizes that for people like him the book as a physical object is just as important as what lies inside it. “We’re interested in where food and society connect … So we just keep pushing the boundaries, looking for things that show unusual aspects of that, things that tell us a bit more about what it is to be human,” he adds. The sentiment captures the ethos of many rare‑booksellers who view each volume as a carrier of story, history and tactile memory.
Why the Physical Book Matters Beyond Its Text
White elaborates on the deeper resonance of a book’s materiality. “That’s what most of us [rare booksellers] do. We handle things that have a story,” he explains, noting that the binding, paper quality, marginalia and even the wear on a cover can reveal layers of meaning inaccessible to a plain digital copy. For him, a book is not merely a vessel for words but an artefact that encodes cultural practices—whether a vintage cookbook illustrating changing dietary habits or a pamphlet documenting a forgotten social movement. This perspective underpins the alarm felt when those same objects are earmarked for destruction in the name of AI training.
The Rise of Destructive Scanning in AI Training
Recently, vendors and rare‑books experts have grown anxious that these artefacts may be under threat from generative‑AI companies seeking to feed their models with new texts. Fears stem from a copyright lawsuit brought against AI firm Anthropic in the United States by book authors. Unsealed court files revealed earlier this year that Anthropic engaged in the practice of “destructive scanning”—buying physical books, slicing off the spines to more efficiently scan the pages, then pulping the remains. The judge ruled this was lawful under US copyright law, characterizing the activity as “transformative use.” The practice is now understood to be widespread among generative‑AI firms, with intermediaries emerging to streamline the pipeline from secondhand shelves to data‑centers.
Unusual Orders from Zoom Books Alarm Australian Sellers
Multiple vendors confirmed to Guardian Australia that they had received orders from a Canadian company called Zoom Books, which describes itself as a book recycler. The orders typically arrived through large secondhand marketplaces such as AbeBooks or Biblio, where inventory ranges from cheap paperbacks to rare, expensive items. Delfina Manor, who runs Good Reading Secondhand Books in Benalla, Victoria, said she received orders from Zoom Books in May amounting to three full boxes, but had to write to the company and ask them not to order in such volume again. “They ordered, paid in advance, and they didn’t quibble over the postage … [but] it would have been about 30‑40 books, and so finding them, packing them, making sure you hadn’t missed one out … It was just driving me nuts,” Manor remarked. John Sainsbury, owner of Melbourne’s Sainsburys Books, echoed the experience, noting a slew of orders from Zoom Books that came through the store’s online listings around the same time. The orders were price insensitive and appeared entirely random—niche titles, “bottom‑end” stock and sometimes decades‑old volumes. The result saw Sainsburys shipping multiple boxes overseas.
Speculation About Arbitrage and the Strange Mix of Titles
Some vendors speculated that Zoom Books might be buying the books on arbitrage—a common enough tactic in the secondhand book trade—but the specific requests nevertheless seemed odd. In one order, a 1970s manual on soil mechanics was purchased alongside a 2010 book titled Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling, a collection of Early Australian Poetry (1982), and a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. The poetry book sold for just $9 and had languished on the shelf for two decades. Such seemingly incongruous bundles suggest the buyer is less interested in the individual market value of each title and more interested in acquiring volume for some downstream process, possibly feeding the destructive‑scanning pipeline.
Booksellers Weigh Financial Gain Against Cultural Loss
For booksellers struggling to catalogue vast stocks, the bulk sales are not necessarily bad. Nick Dawes, who runs Grant’s Bookshop with his wife Jenny, estimates they hold about 500,000 books in their warehouses. “If somebody wanted to come and buy all my books and cut them up, well … I’d be unhappy at one level, but I’d be happy at another,” says Dawes. He adds a crucial caveat: “But if somebody said to me, look, this is the only known copy, I’m going to cut it up, then I’d say, I think I’d rather not send it to you.” Gwenyth Todd of Chatelaine Books shares a similar ethical stance. “When I sell a book and then find the prints available individually, I just find it physically abhorrent,” she says, noting that she screens buyers to ensure volumes do not go “to the wrong home.” For Todd, books are more than just objects; they are carriers of meaning that deserve respect.
Responses from Anthropic and Zoom Books
An Anthropic spokesperson told Guardian Australia that the company has never bought from Zoom Books, but that “sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry.” The spokesperson added that Anthropic procures its books from mainstream commercial markets and insisted, “None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” Zoom Books’ co‑founder, Manroop Gill, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that the firm had been “expanding aggressively” in the past months. A spokesperson for Zoom Books denied that it destructively scans books, stating, “We acquire secondhand books and resell them intact. We do not digitize books. Our priority is always reuse, and when a book can no longer be rehomed, it is responsibly recycled.” When asked whether it sells intact books to AI companies for destructive scanning, the spokesperson replied, “Our commercial agreements require confidentiality, so we do not disclose or discuss our customers.”
The Ongoing Tension Between Innovation and Preservation
Tim White captures the dilemma succinctly: “If it’s a $20 book of which there’s … 500,000 copies in Australia, I wouldn’t cry,” he says. “I’d have different issues around copyright.” He continues, “If it’s a book that has that storytelling element to it, or it’s a one‑off, it’s horrific.” The quote underscores the core tension at the heart of the debate: while AI developers argue that accessing vast textual corpora is essential for model advancement, rare‑booksellers warn that the indiscriminate pulping of unique or culturally significant volumes erases irreplaceable heritage. As the Melbourne Rare Book Fair approaches, the conversation will likely intensify, with sellers, scholars and technologists navigating the fine line between harnessing the power of AI and safeguarding the tangible stories bound within each page.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain