A 'bananas' order for 5,000 obscure titles from a bookshop in Galway fuels suspicion
A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
Independent booksellers across Europe are receiving massive orders for obscure titles, sparking fears that tech companies are using them to train AI. A Galway bookshop got an order for 5,000 books, while Berlin dealers see orders worth up to €50,000. Suspicions point to AI firms like Anthropic, which settled a copyright lawsuit for $1.5 billion after scanning books. German booksellers believe bots are buying books with ISBNs to feed large language models, despite legal and ethical concerns.
“For me the intention here is to fragment human thinking even further,” he said, “to make people question even more their critical thinking abilities.”
- vintermann
> with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966
So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents.
If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo, to be honest.
I've had family members in the used books business, and trust me the fate of the vast majority of these books was always to be pulped.
- paweladamczuk
> “Under German law scanning books – regardless of the purpose – would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,”
Excuse me, what?
- ilamont
Two American self published nonfiction authors I know reported large purchases of new books earlier this year, more than 50 units at a time, via Amazon. This is unusual because the books are not well known. Because the books do not sell well otherwise, they were very few used copies available for sale on Amazon.
Here's my AI theory: someone is purchasing lots of books en masse to be packaged and sold for LLM training to multiple clients (not just a single company like Anthropic), but only scanning once and then reselling the scans while preserving a "chain of custody" proof that individual copies were purchased. Claude shot that idea down for reasons related to the intricacies of US first sale doctrine and copyright law, but had an ambiguous response when I proposed that it might be Chinese companies doing something similar for training AI models that are intended for possible resale to overseas markets.
- Cthulhu_
This is a good thing to a point, right? They sell heaps of stock, some old / outdated stock (like "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" as per the article), in bulk, at full price, no questions asked. Retailer's dreams come true.
(I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)
- stockresearcher
In the case of English-language books, they’re just working to legitimize the stuff they already obtained via, um, dubious methods.
Public domain books - no need to bother, they’ve scraped PG and any other source and can do with it what they like.
Used booksellers should raise the price of used books that are of no interest to any real reader.