Second-hand booksellers across Europe are sounding the alarm, because rare books are being destroyed. They have received random lists of thousands of titles. Books too obscure to resell at a profit. Requests arriving overnight from companies nobody in the trade has heard of.

One bookseller told 404 Media his inventory is full of rare, foreign-language and low-circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they will be even harder to obtain.



One email came from "Nataly" at 2077AI, a Singapore company. Attached: 3,000 English titles grouped by ISBN. A 1999 geomechanics monograph. A 2018 study of laser shock peening on ceramics. A 2021 academic book on Irish folk tales.

A German dealer watched the orders arrive every night between 3am and 5am. Canadian company Zoom Books, buying systematically, titles with nothing in common. Zoom told Swiss broadcaster SRF that this is a regular recycling and trading model.