Japanese used bookstores see fivefold sales surge as AI firms buy books by the ton

Used bookstores in Japan are enjoying an unexpected sales boom, with books being bought in the hundreds or even by the ton. According to a report by NTV Japan, owners are greeting the surge with mixed feelings: much of the stock is suspected to be heading to foreign AI companies that scan the books and then destroy them.

Orders arrive through online marketplaces

NTV reports a large swell of orders placed with bookstores that sell through online marketplaces. Some stores say they have sold hundreds of books a day through these channels, with individual days when sales multiplied fivefold.

Several different accounts are behind the bulk purchases, but they all ask for shipments to a logistics center in Okayama Prefecture. The operator of that center declined to comment or answer the news site's questions.

A 50-ton consignment and an inquiry for tens of thousands of books

The report notes records of a 50-ton consignment of Japanese books shipped to the United States to be churned through Anthropic's destructive scanning process. A used bookstore in western Japan also received an email from a foreign company inquiring about an order of tens of thousands of books.

The pattern echoes earlier reporting in the U.S. and Europe, where AI companies have been accused of buying up millions of books through middlemen, scanning them for training data and then shredding the physical copies.

The genres give the operation away

The choice of titles also points to industrial-scale scanning. A Tokyo bookstore owner told NTV that novels and comics used to be the best sellers; the new bulk orders instead focus on philosophy, history, political history, medicine, law and topics such as "life and culture in the Edo period."

Bookstore owners remain ambivalent. The boom is welcome while it lasts, but if used books are fully removed from circulation, businesses will face tighter stock and rising prices — and readers may lose access to titles that are no longer in print.