Independent booksellers are noting a sharp rise in secondhand book sales, driven in part by unusual large-scale purchases. The buyers are often anonymous, and the orders far exceed what typical readers would acquire for personal use.
Trade observers believe the bulk purchases may be linked to artificial intelligence development, with volumes of text needed to train language models. There are reports that many of these books end up being discarded or pulped rather than resold, raising questions about the sustainability of the practice.
The trend highlights an unexpected intersection between the analog world of used books and the digital demands of machine learning, though the full extent of the impact on the secondhand market remains unclear.