Rare books shredded to feed AI: Australian sellers sound the alarm
Secondhand and rare book dealers in Australia say old books are being bulk-bought, scanned for AI training data, then destroyed. For the people who trade in physical books, that process feels like cultural vandalism.
Key points
- Australian rare and secondhand booksellers believe old books are being purchased in bulk, scanned to create AI training data, then physically destroyed.
- Dealers say the books lost include rare and out-of-print titles that cannot be replaced once gone.
- The concern centres on AI training pipelines: the large-scale processes companies use to feed text into AI systems before the models can generate language.
- Melbourne bookseller Tim White, who runs Books for Cooks, is among those raising the alarm ahead of the Melbourne Rare Book Fair.
- No single company has been publicly identified as responsible for the buying and scanning activity.
Tim White handles a dust-jacketed book the way a surgeon handles an instrument: carefully, deliberately, with obvious respect. Setting up his stall at Melbourne University's Wilson Hall before the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, he put it plainly: "Sometimes books tell you more than the content."
For White and other Australian dealers, the physical object matters as much as the words inside it. A handwritten dedication, a water stain, a particular edition's typeface: all of it carries meaning. Which is why what they believe is happening to some of their stock feels, to them, like destruction for destruction's sake.
What are sellers actually claiming?
Dealers believe buyers are acquiring old books in bulk, scanning them to build text datasets, then discarding or destroying the originals. Those datasets feed AI training pipelines: the industrial-scale processes that technology companies use to teach large language models (AI systems, like the ones behind ChatGPT, that learn to generate human-sounding text by reading enormous quantities of existing writing) how to produce language.
The Guardian reported the concern raised by sellers at the fair. No individual company has been named publicly, and no confirmed proof has emerged linking specific bulk purchases to a named AI firm. What sellers describe is a pattern: unusual bulk buying of obscure or out-of-print titles, with no trace of those books resurfacing in the secondhand market afterward.
Why does this matter beyond book lovers?
Rare and out-of-print books are finite by nature. A first-edition pamphlet or a locally printed title from the 1920s may exist in only a handful of copies worldwide. Scan it and shred it, and the physical record is gone. Libraries and archives do digitise books, but they keep the originals.
A legal question sits just below the surface too. Authors and publishers have already launched lawsuits in the United States arguing that scanning copyrighted books to train AI without permission violates copyright law. Our coverage of the Anthropic settlement on 21 July 2026 showed what that litigation can produce: $3,000 per title, across a $1.5 billion deal. Physical destruction adds a further layer of concern, though Australian copyright law's intersection with AI training is largely untested in court.
For ordinary people the practical upshot is this: the secondhand book market, already a fragile ecosystem of small independent dealers, may be losing irreplaceable stock to a supply chain most buyers know nothing about.
What should readers watch for?
If you sell books through online platforms or to bulk buyers you don't recognise, be cautious about unusually large purchase offers where the buyer shows no apparent interest in the titles themselves. Ask questions. Independent booksellers suggest dealing with known buyers and established fairs where care for physical objects is part of the culture.
Researchers and journalists tracking AI training data sourcing are best placed to establish firmer links between bulk buying and specific companies. That work's ongoing, and it's the thread worth pulling.
