Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?

throwaway27448

Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.

Zigurd

Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase. The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search. One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.

pessimizer

It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if some company's lawyer has decided that they need to buy a new copy for each model they train. Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.

chis

Whatever judge ruled that it was legal to scan and use books if and only if you DESTROY a copy of the book was truly a moron. The law gets bent by judges all the time to be practical and fair, they should have used this opportunity to give a more sane ruling.

Cider9986

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solenoid0937

Don't all these AI companies run at negative margins? How do they afford to buy all the books in the world? I don't see how these companies are not already bankrupt given how much they subsidize

1vuio0pswjnm7

1786782923 | Secondhand UK and Irish booksellers suspect AI firms behind strange bulk orders | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-irelan... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308856

ChrisArchitect

Related: AI companies are shredding rare books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738