Imagine a little Tokyo bookseller who usually sells his manga and novels one at a time, and who has been seeing orders for a hundred books a day coming in since August, as regular as clockwork, for books on philosophy, medicine, law or everyday life in the Edo period that no one had touched for years.

That's what the Japanese channel Nippon TV reported on September 22. Online used-book sellers saw their sales multiplied by five on some days. Five times! And in the business, everyone suspects the same thing: these books aren't going to a library. They're going to feed an artificial intelligence, and they're getting there in slices.

Books sold by weight, like potatoes

Orders coming in like clockwork

The first weird thing is the regularity. A bookseller in the Tokyo region, in his fifties, who sold more than a thousand books to these mystery customers, noticed that the orders arrived at perfectly regular intervals. His opinion: it's not a human clicking, it's a system buying everything by itself.

Second weird thing, the books themselves. A Tokyo bookseller says there is "no logic" to it: philosophy, history, medicine, law, a book about life and culture in the Edo period, another about Japanese politics thirty years ago. Usually, it's novels and manga that keep the shop running. Here, they're buying exactly the books that sit at the back and that no one asks for anymore.

Third thing, the packages. The orders come from several different accounts, at several different booksellers, but they all go to the same address: a logistics center in Okayama Prefecture, in western Japan. The company that manages it said it did not comment on individual transactions. And a bookseller in the west of the country even received an email from a foreign company asking him, with the utmost seriousness, whether he could sell it "several tens of thousands" of them.

When your philosophy section sells better than your manga, you start asking questions

And then there's the figure that went all over the web. Nippon TV dug through export records with a tool that tracks commercial exchanges, and found more than 50 tonnes of packages labeled "JAPANESE BOOKS" that have gone to the United States since last year, shipped by a subsidiary of a major Japanese book distributor. If they're hardcover books weighing about 500 grams, that's roughly 100,000 books. An entire municipal library taking the boat!

Let's be clear for two seconds: no one has yet proved who is buying, or why. The distributor swears it has never knowingly sold anything for training an AI. But when you look at what's been happening in the United States for the past year, the suspicion isn't far-fetched at all.

Why does an AI need old books?

A chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude learns to write by reading. A lot. Billions of sentences. The problem is that the Internet is mostly comments, forums, copy-paste and mistakes. A medical textbook from the 70s, on the other hand, was written by someone who knew what they were talking about, proofread, corrected, printed. That's gold for a machine that wants to learn to write well.

And this isn't a theory. In January, the Washington Post published the internal documents of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, which came out of a lawsuit with authors. The project was called Panama, and the opening sentence gets straight to the point: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan every book in the world." Just below it: "We don't want anyone to know." So much for that.

The goal, according to these documents, was to teach Claude to write well, instead of imitating the low-grade language of the Internet. Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars buying from major online retailers, and cutting up perhaps millions of used books. And the guy running the project had previously set up Google Books' partnerships. You don't recruit a book-scanning specialist by chance.

When I read that, I thought to myself: "Wait, the Claude that reviews my code every day learned its manners from books sent to the guillotine?" Well, yes.

And it's legal, at least in the United States. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled: buying a book, scanning it and using it to train an AI counts as "fair use", the exception in US law that authorizes certain uses without asking the author for permission, even if the paper ends up in the trash. On the other hand, the pirated books Anthropic had also downloaded didn't fly: in September 2025, the company agreed to pay the authors $1.5 billion to make the lawsuit go away. In other words, according to the judge: buy your books, and you have the right to scan them.

The paper cutter, AI's best friend

Why destroy the book? Because turning pages is slow. A scanner that photographs an open book has to wait for a robot or a human to turn each page, and near the binding the paper curves and the image is distorted. So you take a hydraulic paper cutter (a big paper guillotine), cut off the spine of the book, and end up with a stack of loose sheets. These sheets go through a sheet-feed scanner, the same principle as the office photocopier that swallows a stack of paper, at several dozen pages per minute. The paper goes for recycling. The book dies, its text survives in a file.

You slide the book in, take your fingers away, press the button, and that's it for the book

Google, for its part, did the opposite. Since 2004, Google Books has been photographing books without damaging them, with cameras above the pages, and Google announced in 2019 that more than 40 million books had been digitized. It's slower, more expensive, but libraries get their books back intact. Twenty years later, the AI race has chosen the brute-force method.

And Anthropic isn't alone. In August, the investigative site 404 Media told the story of a bookseller who had received an anonymous order for 1,000 books and was wondering where they were going. His solution? He slipped an AirTag, Apple's little tracker, between the pages of one of the books. The book ended up in an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, nicknamed VGT3, whose team has a dinosaur showing its teeth while holding a book as its logo. I'm not making any of this up. An employee summed it up on a forum: "All we do here is scan books." Amazon confirmed that it buys books "to improve its customers' products and services."

The bookseller played detective, and the package led him straight to Amazon

So, concretely, what does this change for you?

Let's start with the good side, because there is one. That old book about eighteenth-century Japanese medicine, it was read by three people a year, at the back of a shop in Tokyo. Once swallowed by an AI, anyone can ask it a question about the book from their phone, in French, at two in the morning. Everything that was never put online, the law manuals from thirty years ago, the accounts of everyday life under the shoguns, becomes accessible to millions of people who would never have pushed open the door of that bookshop.

And the day you ask your chatbot to write you a letter to your insurer or your sister's wedding speech, if it writes proper French instead of forum gibberish, that's partly thanks to these chopped-up books.

Now, the downside. A book that gets scanned and then ground up is one fewer paper copy on the planet. For a best-seller printed in a million copies, who cares. For a book of which only a few copies remain, it's another matter, and that's precisely what Japanese booksellers fear: that rare books will leave Japan forever. Anthropic says that none of its programs buys or destroys "rare" or "old" books. As for the other buyers, we have no idea, since we don't even know who they are.

And secondhand booksellers are stuck. Today, their sales are booming. Tomorrow, there will be fewer old books in circulation, so less stock to buy back, and at a higher price. As for the law, Japan is fairly accommodating: its copyright law allows a machine to analyze a work without asking permission, as long as it doesn't cause unreasonable harm to the author. And the author, on a secondhand sale, doesn't get anything anyway.

Personally, I'm torn. I pay for Claude every day and I appreciate that it writes properly, so I'd be in no position to act offended. But there's still one thing that nags at me: in fifty years, will we have to ask an AI what a book we can no longer open was about, because its last copy was shredded into confetti in a Las Vegas warehouse with a dinosaur on the logo?

Sources

• Nippon TV (NNN), September 22, 2026: the massive orders from used-book dealers and the 50 tons exported
• The Washington Post, January 27, 2026: Anthropic's Panama project
• 404 Media, August 17, 2026: the AirTag and Amazon's warehouse in Las Vegas
• Gadget Review, September 24, 2026: what has been established and what remains a suspicion