The owner of the Fènix bookstore in Badalona, Marçal Font, warns of a mass purchase of second-hand books by tech companies to train artificial intelligence models. The copies, many of them out of print and without a digital copy, are sent to logistics centres in the United States where they are scanned and destroyed.
Marçal Font, owner of the Fènix bookstore in Badalona, began to suspect when he received up to seven orders for old and out-of-print books in a single day. All were from the same company, ZoomBooks, and were destined for a logistics centre near Chicago airport. The titles, such as 'Les coques catalanes' or local history guides, had been in stock for years without attracting interest.
Font contacted other booksellers and discovered that the phenomenon was global. In Germany, France, and other parts of Spain, second-hand bookstores were receiving similar orders. The mass purchase was being made through platforms like AbeBooks, owned by Amazon, and always followed the same pattern: lots of books published between the 1970s and 1990s, many without ISBNs and with print runs of just a few hundred copies.
“The efficient way to scan hundreds of millions of books is through destructive digitisation: tearing off the spine to scan as quickly as possible,” explains Font, who is also a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Barcelona.
According to an investigation by 'The Washington Post', behind this operation is the company Anthropic, developer of the artificial intelligence model Claude. The so-called Panama Project aims to scan and destroy all the books in the world to obtain new data to train its systems, given the scarcity of information available on the internet.
Font clarifies that the digitisation of modern books with ISBNs is not necessarily negative. The problem, he warns, is the pre-ISBN or non-digitised material, of which there is barely any trace in libraries or official institutions. “It’s very rational, very machine-like. We have to see it from a turbo-capitalist perspective: if you wanted to scan all the books in the world, you would programme a machine to buy all the ISBN listings you don’t have,” he points out.
The mass purchase of second-hand books to train artificial intelligence raises a debate about the protection of bibliographic heritage. Font calls for institutions to take action: “We have a capital that we can put on the table to be sovereign over our own heritage.”
For now, the Fènix bookstore in Badalona continues to receive suspicious orders. Font has decided to report the situation to raise awareness about the value of out-of-print books and the need to preserve their content before it is devoured by machines.
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