Marçal Font, from the Fènix bookstore in Badalona, has alerted to suspicious orders from a Canadian company that acquires lots of out-of-print books to scan and destroy them, aiming to feed artificial intelligence models.
The Badalona bookseller Marçal Font, owner of the Fènix bookstore, has detected an unusual purchasing pattern in recent weeks: consecutive orders from the same buyer, separated by just a minute, accumulating hundreds of copies of out-of-print non-fiction. The purchasing company, identified as ZoomBooks, is based in Canada and sends the books to a logistics operator in Illinois (USA) to be scanned and subsequently destroyed.
Font, who runs his bookstore in Badalona, explained to local media that the orders lack thematic coherence and that the buyer shows total indifference to the price. Among the titles acquired are a monograph on the castellers of Granollers from the seventies, a technical manual on winemaking, congress proceedings from half a century ago, and diaries from the Civil War. “This is not a regular customer; it seems like a robot,” the bookseller noted.
The phenomenon is not exclusive to Badalona. About twenty second-hand bookstores across Spain have sold to the same company since late April, some with orders of over a thousand copies. Simultaneously, the same pattern is repeating in Germany, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia: a Silicon Valley company has made an order of over 3,000 books from a Spanish bookstore.
The final destination of these books is destruction. According to reports, ZoomBooks sends the lots to PrepFort, a logistics operator in Illinois that scans and catalogs the copies. Once digitized, the physical books are shredded. When questioned about this, the company merely states that it does not comment on its business agreements due to confidentiality and describes itself as a second-hand bookstore dedicated to recycling.
Behind this practice lies a specific legal framework. In June 2025, federal judge William Alsup ruled in the case Bartz v. Anthropic that training language models with legally purchased books constitutes a transformative use protected by the doctrine of fair use. The ruling also deemed it legal to digitize those copies, but only if the printed copy disappears in the process. If the physical book survives the scanning, the company would retain two copies having paid for one, which would weaken the fair use argument. Thus, the shredder becomes a mandatory step in the legal process.
Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, was already running a large-scale purchasing operation internally dubbed Project Panama, according to internal documents revealed by The Washington Post from declassified court writings. Although ZoomBooks denies directly collaborating with Anthropic, the connection between the two companies has been a subject of speculation.
Meanwhile, another intermediary operates, ISBNdb, a database of bibliographic metadata that offers AI labs the purchase of between one thousand and one million books on demand. On its own website, it explains that printed books prior to 2022 are the reserve of human text that no internet tracking can guarantee anymore, protected from contamination by texts generated by the AI itself that now flood the web.
For booksellers in Badalona and the rest of Spain, the situation generates uncertainty. “They pay us well, but we don’t know what real use they make of the books,” Font comments. Meanwhile, machines continue to devour pages to feed algorithms, and shredders do not stop.
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