{"id":629708,"date":"2026-08-10T06:57:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T06:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/629708\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T06:57:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T06:57:28","slug":"a-mysterious-buying-spree-is-unsettling-europes-booksellers-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/629708\/","title":{"rendered":"A mysterious buying spree is unsettling Europe\u2019s booksellers \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Galway<\/a> to Berlin<\/a> and beyond, independent booksellers across Europe agree that something very strange is going on.<\/p>\n

Last May Tom\u00e1s Kenny of famous Galway book retailer Kennys received what he describes as a \u201cbananas\u201d online order for 5,000 books. But it was less the scale of the order that caught his eye and more its eclectic selection.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA,\u201d said Kenny.<\/p>\n

Large orders are nothing new for the kennys.ie<\/a> website. It was only the second bookshop in the world to launch a website in 1994 and it is popular with large institutions, such as Asian universities seeking to stock shelves in newly opened English libraries.<\/p>\n

But when publicly funded institutions contact him, they usually negotiate a bulk price. May\u2019s online order \u2013 with no haggling \u2013 sent up a second red flag.<\/p>\n

\"LastLast May, Tom\u00e1s Kenny of Kennys Bookshop, received a ‘bananas’ online order for 5,000 books <\/p>\n

Over in Berlin, booksellers in the German capital are grappling with similar-sized mass orders. They arrive in the night via email, are as profitable as they are perplexing, involving dusty books that no one in their right mind would buy. Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition, anyone?<\/p>\n

Booksellers say it is not unusual for these orders to range from \u20ac10,000-\u20ac50,000, welcome income amid an ongoing earthquake in their industry thanks to Amazon and other online booksellers. Yet many fear that, with these bulk orders, they may be signing their own death warrant. <\/p>\n

As evidence, they point to a January Washington Post report about a similar mass-order phenomenon among US antiquarian book retailers.<\/p>\n

According to that report, AI<\/a> giant Anthropic<\/a> was behind Project Panama, spending \u201ctens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Anthropic\u2019s Claude AI models hack into 3 outside groups during testingOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Details of the US plan emerged through filings related to a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic. That ended with a $1.5 billion settlement with book authors.<\/p>\n

Berlin antiquarian book dealer Urban Zerfass has no doubt some tech giants are engaged in a similar practice in Europe. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Anthropic plan is clear in documents to its investors, meanwhile Amazon earns 20 per cent on every transaction,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s Publishers and Booksellers\u2019 Association has described mass scan-and-pulp practices as destructive and illegal.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder German law scanning books \u2013 regardless of the purpose \u2013 would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,\u201d said Thomas Koch, spokesman for the association. \u201cThat this is now happening with second-hand books is another highly troubling example of this practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

German book retailers have put their heads together and suspect the entire ordering process is being run automatically, by an AI-driven bot, with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966.<\/p>\n

\"AIAI giant Anthropic was behind Project Panama, spending ‘tens of millions of dollars’ to acquire books and scan their pages to feed more knowledge into AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude. Photograph: Jason Henry\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

\u201cToday the ISBN allows the bots or AI log what books it still lacks or has yet to scan,\u201d Markus Brandis, art historian buyer at Berlin auction house Bassenge, told Germany\u2019s Welt daily.<\/p>\n

What is happening and its legality depends, however, on where it is happening. European booksellers say they have noticed a shift in the mass orders, away from costly shipping of titles across the Atlantic to addresses around Europe. The suspicion is that these are collection points for books, which are then shipped in bulk in containers to the US.<\/p>\n

There, more liberal \u201cfair use\u201d policies make it legal for the owner of a book to scan and destroy. This was the basis of the 2025 legal settlement between Anthropic and authors.<\/p>\n

In a statement to US media, Anthropic said Claude was trained on a mix of \u201cpublicly available web data, commercially acquired data sets, and data we generate ourselves\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cSourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry,\u201d it said. \u201cNone of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.\u201d<\/p>\n

German booksellers are not convinced. They are sure, based on the vast orders, that the process is happening anyway via third-party service providers. And while Anthropic has been exposed in court, it is highly likely that many tech giants are engaged in similar practices.<\/p>\n

And what is the end goal, after the AI has been trained? Berlin bookseller Zerfass thinks the consequences are vast \u2013 far more than a final death knell for booksellers like him.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me the intention here is to fragment human thinking even further,\u201d he said, \u201cto make people question even more their critical thinking abilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GermanGerman booksellers are convinced that large orders of old books are being used to feed large language models owned by AI giants. Photograph: Sean Gallup\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

In Galway, Kenny is less philosophical and more practical, yet equally alarmed at how AI is \u201cterrifying our industry\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cBooksellers tend to be at the forefront of a lot of moral dilemmas, and political and ethical issues. In most scenarios it is not for me to decide,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, if they are taking a book and scanning it with a view to taking intellectual property, then Kennys do not want to be a part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Galway to Berlin and beyond, independent booksellers across Europe agree that something very strange is going on.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,6006,289,290,25123,18,1878,6621,19,17,82],"class_list":["post-629708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-berlin","tag-eire","tag-galway","tag-germany","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117069916451110951","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}