My abridged version:

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.

“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.”

“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 AbeBooks, 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.

Her advice to fellow bookshop owners?

“Don't do it. Don't feed the machine. Pause and think.”