Mystery Bulk Buyers Are Emptying Secondhand Bookshops

Stuart Manley has sold books for decades at Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, but nothing quite like this. Since around May 2026, he has fielded orders for hundreds of titles from a handful of buyers, netting roughly £4,000, for a selection with no discernible theme: an Estonian translation of John le Carré's The Mission Song, Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and a 1983 issue of Warship magazine among them.

He is not alone. The Guardian reports that secondhand booksellers across the UK, Ireland, the US, Australia and continental Europe have seen a surge of unusual bulk purchases since early 2026, and many suspect AI companies are behind it, quietly hunting for training data.

David Gower-Spence of BookLovers of Bath received rush orders for around 200 books between May and July from buyers whose names recur across other sellers' accounts. One UK bookseller, speaking anonymously, said they have sold 6,000 books since January to similar buyers, worth thousands of pounds, and noted the purchasers never haggled, paying full price regardless of volume.

In Ireland, Jim Shaughnessy of MW Books in Claregalway described orders so eclectic they read like a randomizer: books on agricultural tools in 18th-century Africa alongside biographies of 1950s racing drivers. He called the buying pattern sporadic and mechanical, with no thread of collector interest tying the selections together.

A trail leading to freight warehouses

A delivery postcode shared across multiple buyers, seen by the Guardian, traces back to a cluster of freight warehouses near Heathrow, a detail that hints at logistics operations built for scanning and shipping at scale rather than individual collectors. Zoom Books, a Canada-based firm describing itself as North America's leading book recycling company, was named by several sellers as one of the purchasers.

The pattern echoes previously confirmed behavior from the AI industry. Anthropic has acknowledged its "Project Panama" effort, in which it spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and scanning millions of physical books to train its models, a legally cleaner route than scraping pirated text.

Buyers paid "top whack" for bulk lots, sellers said, without ever asking for a volume discount.

No AI company has confirmed involvement in this latest wave of purchases, and the buyers' identities remain unconfirmed beyond the recurring names and shipping addresses booksellers have compared notes on. But the scale, the indifference to price, and the workmanlike randomness of the selections all point toward data acquisition rather than nostalgia, leaving used bookshops as unlikely suppliers in the race to feed ever-hungrier language models.