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Over the last few months, independent, second-hand booksellers across the world have experienced mysterious bulk orders from foreign-based buyers, writes Dr Mark Hyland.
Irish booksellers have not been immune from this strange phenomenon, with both MW Books in Claregalway and Kennys of Galway receiving mysterious bulk orders.
Intriguingly, the orders are rarely grouped by distinct themes, such as sport or gardening.
Arcane themes
Instead, these random large orders may cover eclectic and arcane themes, such as agricultural implements in eighteenth-century Africa, marriage litigation in medieval England, a history of Connemara and, the Eddie Hobbs guide to your SSIA!
To add to the intrigue, the bulk orders frequently arrive late at night by e-mail, there will be no attempt to haggle over price, and the order may involve dusty books that have lain on bookstore shelves for a considerable time. The mass orders are as profitable as they are perplexing.
Besides being a significant disruptor of the second-hand book trade, these unusual orders have inevitably given rise to much speculation.
Destructive scanning
The general consensus appears to be that certain AI companies are acquiring the books, slicing off their spines, then scanning their contents before, most likely, pulping them.
The process is known as destructive scanning and involves using the content of these legitimately acquired (purchased) physical books to train large language models (LLMs), the foundational technology behind most AI tools.
Many of the books targeted in these mysterious orders were published prior to the emergence of ChatGPT (in November 2022), meaning that they are unpolluted by material that could have been generated by AI chatbots.
Legal catalyst
It seems that the 2025 US judgment in Bartz v Anthropic may be the real reason for the boom in second-hand sales.
The case concerned three authors who brought a lawsuit against Anthropic, the AI firm, for alleged misuse of their books during the defendant’s training of its LLMs.
As revealed by court documents unsealed during litigation, Anthropic engaged in destructive scanning of lawfully purchased physical books.
The process was straightforward and irreversible and involved shearing off the books’ spines using hydraulic powered cutters and then feeding the pages into high-speed industrial scanners capable of doing 80 to 120 pages per minute.
The overall objective was to build a permanent library of digitised books so as to train Claude, Anthropic’s next-generation AI assistant.
It was all part of Anthropic’s Project Panama, which started in early 2024.
There were a number of distinct outcomes to the Bartz v Anthropic ruling.
Settlement of $1.5 billion
The piracy claim settled for $1.5 billion – the largest copyright settlement on record. In July, a federal judge in San Francisco signed off on this landmark settlement.
In addition, two other outcomes concerned the US doctrine of fair use.
This doctrine is a flexible and open-ended approach to copyright law and permits limited use of copyright-protected material without the permission of the owner (even in a commercial context), provided the use is transformative and does not harm the original market.
Firstly, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California ruled that training an LLM on copyrighted books was exceedingly transformative and therefore fair use.
Secondly, he held that destructively scanning legally purchased print books to build a searchable digital library was also fair use.
The learned judge’s reasoning was that the AI company was merely replacing a print copy of a book (which it legally owned) with a digital file, a process that did not involve the creation of an unauthorised copy.
EU’s ‘less flexible’ approach
It is worth noting that the US fair-use doctrine differs markedly from the EU’s less flexible approach to copyright law, which is built on a strict, closed list of copyright exceptions and a rejection of the fair-use doctrine.
Given the availability of the fair-use doctrine in the US, it is entirely unsurprising that most of these mass-order books appear to be destined for that country.
But it can be a circuitous route as, more and more, these orders are being sent to addresses in Europe before being shipped in bulk in containers to the US!
Dr Mark Hyland, BCL, Dipl Eur Law, LLM (EU Law), PhD (IP Law), solicitor, is a lecturer in the Faculty of Business at Technological University Dublin. His primary research interest is in copyright law with a specific emphasis on its dynamic intersection with emerging technologies.
Dr Hyland previously served as the inaugural IMRO Adjunct Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the Law Society of Ireland from 2019 to 2024. He is a frequent contributor to the Law Society Gazette, where he provides regular analysis on intellectual-property-law developments.
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