We have written about why AI companies are buying up old books: printed before the internet filled with machine-made text, they are a clean source of language, free of AI slop. This is what that hunger looks like from the other end. In Australia, secondhand booksellers fear someone is slicing apart and pulping the rarest titles on their shelves to train the machines.

The fear traces to a US copyright case against Anthropic, brought by book authors. Unsealed files revealed a practice called “destructive scanning”: buy the book, slice off the spine, scan the pages, pulp the rest. The Washington Post reported the company tried to keep it quiet. A judge ruled it lawful, as “transformative use.”

The practice is now understood to be widespread, with 404 Media reporting that intermediaries have stepped in to feed it. That is where Australia’s booksellers come in. Several noticed strange waves of orders through the big secondhand marketplaces, Abebooks and Biblio, and started asking who was buying.

The buyer, in many cases, was a Canadian “book recycler” called Zoom Books. As the Guardian reported, the orders were price-insensitive and oddly random. Delfina Manor, in Victoria, got three boxes in May and asked them to stop. One order paired a 1970s soil-mechanics manual with a $9 poetry book that had sat unsold for 20 years.

‘More than just objects’

For sellers drowning in stock, the sales are not all bad. Nick Dawes, who keeps about 500,000 books with his wife Jenny, would happily sell in bulk. His line is the irreplaceable one. “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.”

Tim White of Books for Cooks draws the same line. A $20 book with half a million copies in Australia, he would not mourn. A one-off, “it’s horrific.” AI is not the first buyer to destroy books for profit; dealers have long sliced rare volumes to sell the illustration plates. As bookseller Gwenyth Todd puts it, “to me books are more than just objects.”

Two denials, one silence

Both companies named in the story deny the worst of it. An Anthropic spokesperson said it has never bought from Zoom Books, that it sources books from mainstream commercial markets, and that “none of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” Buying books to train models, it added, is common across the industry.

Zoom Books, whose co-founder said on LinkedIn it had been “expanding aggressively,” says it resells books intact and does not digitise them, recycling only what cannot be rehomed. It would not say whether it sells intact books on to AI firms for scanning. Its commercial agreements, it said, require confidentiality.

That silence is the problem. No vendor has proof their books were destroyed, and the concern is the opacity, not a proven act. A bookseller can screen a buyer they can see. They cannot screen a supply chain that ends behind a confidentiality clause. For a common paperback, no great loss. For the only surviving copy of something, there is no undo.

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