Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders

Book Haven in Wellington's Newtown started to receive more orders than it could possibly handle. When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner Anne-Marie Thorby smelt a rat. A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects. “It started at the end of April. We do sell books all around the world and we were getting some from a company and it was just a couple of books and yay, they're going to a far off place. A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown. “Then that same week it was boom, suddenly the same company was sending us multiple orders, just minutes apart, huge orders. One order was for 71 books, and we physically can't handle that.” The buyer wanted books with ISBNs (a unique code used to identify a specific book, edition, or format) from the 1970s and 1980s, she told RNZ’s Midday Report . “They were local non-fiction niche books, so New Zealand local history, a tourist pamphlet on Waitomo Caves, Māori language books, New Zealand cookbooks, biographies, political cartoons, very niche - the local anglers club.” With postage and tariffs there was no way the buyer could turn a profit, she says. “A $10 book could end up costing $40, so ridiculous.

It had to be something else. That's when we did some sleuthing and contacted Abe Books, their little online forum.” These kinds of odd orders were happening around the world, she says. “Tens of thousands of books being bought by this one company to go to a warehouse in the USA. It was India, it was Europe, it was us, and it wasn't just us in New Zealand, there were other bookshops.” AI companies are buying these books and training their large language models, sometimes destroying books in the process. It's the only way for them to do it, she says. “They're not recycling, they're devouring them, they're destroying them. One of the quotes from the Anthropic court case was, Project Panama - so this is from the company, from Anthropic - Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” When she realised what was happening, she cancelled all the orders, she says. “We cancelled, and we got another lot, a flurry of orders last week, so we cancelled them as well. These are huge orders. There was 10 orders in one day for 180 books, going to another company.” This kind of widespread literary destruction is an anathema to booksellers, she says.

“It's so wrong. Our role is to keep books alive, to keep them in the world. We're book lovers. We want books for the good of humanity, not just to transfer knowledge for private profit, going into building LLM machines.” Our editors pick the best of food, arts, culture and lifestyle. Delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday. Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman had the fable of the fox and the hedgehog in mind when he wrote his new book about diets. The heroine of Meg Mason’s new autobiographical novel Sophie, Standing There is cheerful yet "slightly apart from everybody else" after growing up in a sect. Four-legged listener Tipsie can be found every Wednesday at Whangaparāoa Library. As one of the translators of the ancient poem openly criticises the film, readers are flocking to bookstores and libraries to discover the epic for themselves.

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