Secondhand booksellers are reporting a wave of odd, high-volume orders, and the pattern is raising a bigger question for small businesses: who is buying all these books, and why?
In a report published this morning, The Guardian said booksellers in the UK and Ireland have been fielding bulk requests from mystery buyers, with similar activity also showing up in the US, Australia, and across Europe. The orders are unusual not just for their size, but for how random they are. Instead of clean themes like history, cooking, or motoring, sellers describe combinations of titles that seem to have little relation to one another.
That has led to a theory circulating among booksellers: the buyers may be connected to AI companies seeking training data.
The concern is not abstract. A recent order at Barter Books in Northumberland reportedly included an Estonian translation of a John le Carré novel, a copy of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey from a specific imprint, and an old issue of Warship magazine. Another seller in Ireland said the orders since May have ranged from agricultural implements in 18th century Africa to biographies of racing drivers.
For small booksellers, the immediate impact is mixed. On one hand, more sales can be welcome in a business where margin and turnover matter. On the other, the pattern is disruptive, hard to plan around, and possibly tied to a process that strips value from the books themselves. Some sellers suspect the purchases are intended to be scanned for model training and then recycled or pulped.
That matters because it turns inventory into input. If AI firms are quietly vacuuming up printed material from the secondhand market, they are not just buying content. They are reshaping demand in a corner of retail that depends on knowing what customers want and why.
The broader AI context makes the theory plausible, even if the buyers have not been conclusively identified. The Guardian notes that Anthropic has previously acknowledged large-scale book acquisition as part of its data sourcing approach, while other reporting has described books as valuable training material because older print content is not already saturated with chatbot-generated text.
For small business owners, the lesson is simple: AI does not only change software. It can change supply chains, inventory, and demand patterns in places that have nothing to do with tech on the surface.
If you run a small retail business, this is worth watching. Unusual orders can be a blessing, but only if you know what is driving them. When the buyer is opaque, the upside may come with a hidden cost.