Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?
Secondhand book sellers are reporting unusual bulk purchases, with speculation that buyers are acquiring physical books to use as AI training data before destroying them. The pattern has drawn attention to how AI companies may be sourcing text at scale through unconventional channels.
Why this matters: Authors already lost the argument over whether their published work could be scraped online. Now it looks like their physical books may be getting bought up in bulk, fed into training pipelines, and pulped. They see none of that money and have no way to know it happened. If this is how AI companies are quietly expanding their training data, it is a significant accountability gap — and one that is hard to regulate when it looks, on the surface, like ordinary commerce.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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