Australian Booksellers Warn AI Scanning Could Destroy 500,000-Book Stocks as Zoom Orders Spur Fears
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Aug 1
Australian Booksellers Warn AI Scanning Could Destroy 500,000-Book Stocks as Zoom Orders Spur Fears
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Aug 1
Summary
Australian secondhand booksellers say unusual bulk orders from Canada’s Zoom Books have raised fears their inventory could be feeding AI companies that destructively scan physical books and pulp the remains.
US court filings in the Anthropic copyright case revealed the practice of cutting off spines for faster scanning, and a judge ruled it lawful under US copyright law as transformative use.
Booksellers described the Zoom purchases as price-insensitive and random—one order mixed a 1970s soil mechanics manual with a $9 poetry book that had sat unsold for 20 years.
Dealers said they could tolerate low-value mass-market books being sacrificed, but called it horrific if one-off, rare or story-rich volumes were destroyed for model training.
Anthropic said it has never bought from Zoom Books and does not buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books, while Zoom said it resells books intact and would not discuss customers.
Are random bulk orders from Australian used-book shops feeding AI training pipelines, and who protects rare titles if legal scanning turns books into data?
If buying and destroying common books for AI can be lawful, where should the line be drawn for local history and one-off works?
Why won’t book recyclers say whether scanned-book buyers are their customers, and should marketplaces disclose industrial purchasers of secondhand books?