Abstract:
Japanese second-hand bookstores have experienced an unusual sales boom recently. A large number of books were purchased in bulk by the ton and were suspected of being sent to overseas AI companies for scanning and destruction.
Several bookstores reported that their daily sales reached hundreds of books, with sales soaring to five times the usual volume during some periods. Most of these orders were directed to the same delivery address: a logistics center in Okayama Prefecture.
Records obtained by Japanese television station NTV show that a 50-ton Japanese book order has been sent to the United States and entered Anthropic's scanning process.
Previous reports pointed out that AI companies directly destroyed the original books after scanning them on a large scale in the United States and Europe.
In addition, changes in purchasing categories have further exposed the purpose. A bookstore owner in Tokyo told NTV,
In the past, the best-selling products were novels and comics, but recent bulk orders have focused on topics such as philosophy, history, political history, medicine, law, and the life and culture of the Edo period. This type of knowledge-intensive text is what is most needed for AI training corpus.
Second-hand bookstore owners have mixed feelings about this. The surge in sales will bring short-term income, but if books are removed from the circulation market in batches, it will affect inventory supply and pricing in the long run, and rare editions may disappear.
The deeper issue is copyright. Under current Japanese law, scanning for AI learning purposes is still legal unless it can be proven that the scanning behavior unfairly harms the interests of the copyright owner. However, in this kind of secretive batch operation, it is unlikely that any author will be consulted.
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