Stuart Manley said one recent book order brought in as much money as he usually makes in a week. The founder of Barter Books described the surge on Saturday as used booksellers in the U.K. reported stronger sales.
David Tobin, who runs Walden Books in north London, said his business was also in the midst of a boom. He said, "In some ways it’s very nice to sell some of these titles which haven’t been sold for many years."
Barter Books and Walden Books
The reported that the rise comes as buyers appear to value older titles that may be less exposed to LLM outputs or to destruction in scanning for AI training. One recent report said old books are becoming a premium product because anything published after the adoption of LLMs might have LLM outputs in it. That has shifted attention toward physical copies that predate that risk.
Manley’s single order gave a sharp example of the scale. Tobin’s shop points to the same pattern: books that have sat untouched for years are moving again, and the buyer is not always a conventional reader. Some are treating older books as source material for AI training, while others may be chasing copies that have not yet been scanned.
Project Panama and destructive scanning
Anthropic has already paid out $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit over using illegal copies of books as training data. Court documents reveal that its new plan for ingesting data in books is codenamed Project Panama, and that it uses destructive scanning: a physical copy is scanned and then destroyed in the process.
Anthropic says, "The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers." A court found that scanning books to train AI falls under the fair use doctrine, and Anthropic is obligated to destroy books because only one copy exists before the scan and only one copy exists after, meaning no piracy is occurring.
McNaughtan’s in Edinburgh
Derek Walker, who owns McNaughtan’s in Edinburgh, said he has sold "the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century." He added that "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market — but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed."
That is the contradiction booksellers are living with now: the same market that rewards them for older stock may also feed demand for copies that disappear after scanning. For readers and collectors, the practical choice is already clearer than the long-term picture — books with scarce print runs or no previous scanning history are the ones most likely to draw attention, whether for resale or for AI training.
