Galway book retailer Kennys have said they recently received an order for “several thousands books” which the store’s operators suspect are destined for AI programmers.
“It wouldn’t be unusual for us to get one-off orders of several hundred books to supply libraries or that sort of thing,” bookseller Tomás Kenny told RTÉ’s News at One.
Such orders often come through a third party with the identity of the buyer not being disclosed.
So Mr Kenny assumed that this order, which he received in May, was of this nature.
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“But as we started picking the order it became more unusual,” he said.
The order was “scattergun…anything and everything”, focused on titles which are “so obviously out of date and unusual”, and are also of “poor quality”. Most were non-fiction.
Titles ordered included three-decade-old driving test manuals and a guide to the Celtic Tiger financial scheme the Special Savings Incentive Account (SSIA).
He emphasised that while he doesn’t “have any concrete evidence,” Mr Kenny thinks the orders may be for AI.
“That’s the suspicion, very obviously”.
Mr Kenny said this is not an isolated incident.
The advent of online shopping has “enormously” reduced the number of book vendors, including in Ireland, he noted, meaning there isn’t the close knit community of sellers there once was.
But he started noticing on social media overseas sellers, including in Sweden and German, flagging similarly unusual orders.
The orders came through a third-party seller and the sheer volume of demand for these second-hand books raised suspicions.
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Mr Kenny said they began to get suspicious when they heard from other booksellers in Europe.
“Initially we heard from a Swedish guy, a bookseller friend of ours who did a similar order in Sweden for books in Swedish and then subsequently we heard from booksellers in Germany and it was the same story,” he said.
“Previously when we had a large book order, bulk purchases like this, it might be for a library in Japan that’s setting a university and a new English language library for example. So it would be very obvious but to hear the same story in three different languages, and we suspect that there are more in other EU countries, leads us to believe it’s very suspicious.”
The bulk of the order for 5,000 books consists of mostly non-fiction works from the warehouse upstairs in Kenny’s which is not open to the public.
Kenny’s Director Sarah Kenny said there was an eclectic mix in the bulk purchase.
“There was everything from The History of the Caribbean to the Rules of the Road to Internet Explorer for Dummies to books on health and medicine, just no particular genre and very strange.”
Booksellers across Europe now suspect AI companies are bulk purchasing these obscure, dusty titles.
They believe they may be getting picked up at collection points in Europe and shipped to the US where so called “fair use” policies make it legal to slice the spines and the books are scanned using the text to train artificial intelligence. The physical books are destroyed.
Mr Kenny says booksellers are constantly worried about the future
“Certainly wider society is worried and we have had fears from 150 years ago whether it was the newspapers, the invention of cinema, to radio and tv to audio books, the internet in general,” he said.
He added: “They were all supposed to kill the book. To date it hasn’t happened and I don’t think AI will sink us either. I am worried however for authors. I think the big panic is at the beginning of the industry, that is to say books being published as opposed to books being sold.
“And I’d be worried that very soon AI will be able to mimic authors, and we’ve already heard a few awful stories. There was a book deal in the States cancelled last week. And I know of other authors who are concerned that their books will be so mimicked by AI as to render them useless and sidelined completely.”
Kenny’s celebrated its 85th anniversary last year and has “the oldest books website in the world”, he said, adding that the shop is easily found by anyone looking online.
The matter of copyrighted material being used without authorisation to programme AI is a hot topic.
Anthropic has been ordered to pay in an historic €1.3 billion copyright class-action settlement.
The lawsuit accused the AI company of using over 500,000 pirated books to train its Claude AI model.
Eligible authors and publishers stand to receive roughly €2,600 per qualifying title
A US federal judge granted final approval for the settlement last month.
