James Payne could not figure out what was happening to his business. The Brooklyn rare-book dealer started seeing orders pile up earlier this year for titles so obscure that even he, a man who makes a living off obscure, thought of them as unsellable. Things like “Home Long-Term Oxygen Treatment in Italy.” Things like “Marriage Litigation in Medieval England.” Books that sit on a shelf for a decade and then sit there some more. Suddenly they were flying out the door through Alibris, Biblio and Amazon, and his revenue had roughly doubled compared with the same point in 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal.

He had no idea who was buying them. Neither did anyone else.

If you spent any time this year lurking in the corners of the internet where used-book sellers talk shop, you saw the same conversation looping over and over. Orders were arriving under names that sounded like discarded Tom Clancy plot devices: Red Sparrow Project, Blue Finch Project, Green Parrot Project. The buyers wanted dozens or hundreds of books at once, on subjects with nothing in common, shipped to logistics warehouses. And here’s the part that really got dealers talking, because it never happens in this trade: they did not haggle. Not once. They paid the asking price and asked for more.

At first the worries were logistical, almost charmingly so. A shop that has never packed an order larger than 20 books does not have a system for packing 200. Would these strange new customers actually pay? Then a different question started creeping in, the one nobody really wanted to sit with: what if these books were being bought specifically to be destroyed?

That suspicion turned out to be right, and the story of how sellers confirmed it is genuinely one of the stranger pieces of tech reporting of the past year.

The AirTag heard around the book trade

A seller in the Pacific Northwest got tired of guessing. She slipped credit card-sized location trackers behind the dust jacket flaps of books in two separate shipments in late June and early July, then watched them travel the country on her phone like some deeply nerdy true-crime podcast. One book went to an Ohio warehouse belonging to the marketplace Alibris, then on to an industrial complex in Addison, Illinois, at an address matching a company with a large book-scanning operation. “I think that’s where it died,” she told the Journal. The other took a longer trip: a warehouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, then north Las Vegas near a cluster of Amazon facilities, then across the border to Mexicali, Mexico, where satellite imagery shows a sprawling recycled-paper plant.

A book, in other words, that survived decades on a shelf, reduced to pulp inputs somewhere in northern Mexico.

The tech site 404 Media ran the same play and got an even cleaner answer. Working with a dealer who had received an order of roughly 1,000 books through Biblio, reporters hid an Apple AirTag inside one volume and followed it from California through Milwaukee, a Kenosha distribution warehouse, a Colorado truck stop, and finally to Amazon’s LAS8 facility in North Las Vegas. Inside that building sits a team called VGT3, whose internal logo is, and I promise this is real, a snarling dinosaur clutching an open book. Employees told 404 Media that essentially all they do there is receive enormous shipments of printed books and cut the bindings off so the pages can be scanned faster. A Reddit post from an Amazon worker about a year earlier had already described the gig in six words: “All we do is scan books.“

Amazon later confirmed to 404 Media cofounder Emanuel Maiberg that VGT3 is used for AI training data, as he explained in an interview with NPR. An Amazon spokesman gave the Journal a sentence so smooth it could have been machine-generated: the company buys books through commercial channels “to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.” There is something almost poetic about the company that started as an online bookstore now running a warehouse where the main activity is unmaking books.

Project Panama, and the thing nobody was supposed to know

None of this appeared out of nowhere. The template was set by Anthropic, and we only know about it because a lawsuit forced the documents into daylight.

In January, The Washington Post reported on unsealed filings describing an internal effort that began in early 2024. The planning memo did not bury the lede: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The same document explained the codename with disarming honesty, noting the company did not want it known it was working on this.

The mechanics were industrial. Anthropic hired a logistics manager, rented warehouse space, bought books by the tens of thousands from vendors including Better World Books and the UK’s World of Books, and handed the dirty work to a digitization contractor that used a hydraulic cutter to shear off spines before feeding pages through high-speed scanners, as Euronews reported. Then a recycler came for the remains. Court exhibits show warehouse shelves stacked and labeled, carts loaded with books waiting their turn. The shredding itself, as Kathryn James noted in The Guardian, is the part the photos leave out.

Why books at all? Because they are the good stuff. The court’s own decision described what Anthropic was after: “well-curated facts,” “well-organized analyses,” “captivating fictional narratives.” The company wanted Claude to write like an author rather than like a comment section. And crucially, it wanted text created before 2022, before the internet filled up with AI-written filler that models now risk choking on. Every year that passes makes pre-2022 print more valuable, not less, which is exactly why hydraulic cutters are humming.

Anthropic initially took the shortcut and trained on pirated book troves, a decision that ended with the company agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to settle with authors, roughly $3,000 per work across about 500,000 titles. A federal judge gave the settlement final approval in July 2026, per Reuters, making it the largest copyright settlement in American history. Nearly 120,000 writers and rights holders filed claims covering 91% of the works in the class, Reuters reported in April.

But here’s the twist that shapes everything happening in used bookstores right now. Judge William Alsup ruled that buying physical books, scanning them, and destroying the originals was fair use. His reasoning was almost elegantly simple: “One replaced the other.” No extra copies entered the world; nothing was shown or sold outside the company. The piracy was the crime. The guillotine was legal.

So the industry did the rational thing and went shopping.

Cheap, fast, and one-way

The economics are brutally straightforward once you see the numbers. Destructive scanning, where you strip the binding and sheet-feed loose pages, runs from about $0.10 a page and can drop to roughly $0.05 for high-volume AI corpus work. Non-destructive scanning, where a book rests in a V-shaped cradle and gets photographed page by page, starts around $0.50 a page, according to pricing from vendors like ScanHouse and Reynolds Business Systems. Five to ten times the cost, several times slower, to keep an object that the buyer does not want anyway.

Multiply that gap by a million books and you understand why the spine comes off.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the supply side. Researchers at Epoch AI put an 80% confidence interval on the world’s stock of public human-written text being fully used somewhere between 2026 and 2032. We are now inside that window. Which means the shelves of a shop in Bath or Benalla or Brooklyn have quietly become a strategic resource, and dealers who spent years marking down dead stock are watching it get bid up by buyers who will never read a word of it.

One clue tipped sellers off more than any tracker: the buyers were obsessive about ISBNs. That thirteen-digit code, in use in various forms since the late 1960s, is how a data vendor knows whether a particular edition has already been ingested. Collectors care about condition, provenance, and inscriptions. Machines care about whether the row already exists in the database. Once dealers noticed the pattern, the picture snapped into focus.

The middlemen made it easier still. Earlier this year, 404 Media found that ISBNdb, best known for maintaining ISBN metadata, had advertised a service helping AI labs source bulk print orders from 1,000 to 1 million books, pitched at “LLM training needs” and “delivered at the scale AI demands,” with a page telling booksellers that “the world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf.” Those pages came down. ISBNdb told Fortune the service never launched and it never bought or scanned books for anyone, calling it a test of market interest.

The trade splits in half

Talk to enough dealers and you find they have sorted themselves into two camps that mostly refuse to sneer at each other, which is refreshing.

Mike Floreani, a Texas divorce lawyer who runs the online-only Palos Verdes Books and Ephemera, has hit sales records three months running on the back of these orders. His recent shipments included a textbook on Russia’s post-Soviet economic transition, a Victorian novel, a 2012 Texas civil procedure guide, and a book about a Swedish comedy troupe that was popular in the 1960s. He calls this dead stock, and he means it. Some of it he had already considered hauling to the recycling center himself, which is where plenty of used books end up anyway. “Cultural artifacts?” he told the Journal. “I can categorically tell you that they’re not.“

Stuart Manley, who co-owns Barter Books in Alnwick, England, has been in the trade 30 years and says he has “never seen the like of this.” He sold hundreds of essentially random books to three buyers for about £4,000 and shrugged at the hand-wringing with the best line of the whole saga: “the world no longer needs five million copies of The Da Vinci Code.” He has also had titles listed online for two decades that only just moved, he told the BBC. Elsewhere in Britain, one unnamed dealer has filled orders for 6,000 books since January from buyers paying “top whack” without asking for a discount, per The Guardian.

Then there’s the other camp, and their objection is not sentimental so much as statistical. Derek Walker of McNaughtan’s in Edinburgh laid out the distinction cleanly to the BBC: an academic title printed in 100 copies, 75 of them already in libraries, is no great loss if one gets cut up. But he has handled books that are the only known surviving copy of an eighteenth-century edition. “It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long.“

Allan Stypeck, whose Second Story Books serves the Washington, D.C. area with 75,000 titles online, reached for Dickens when the Journal asked how business was: best of times, worst of times. His volume has skyrocketed and he is in talks to sell directly to one of the bulk buyers. He is also aware he may be pulling the last copy of something out of the world forever. “These books probably have a purpose that will be totally contradictory to the longevity of my business.“

And in Portland, Scott Brown of Downtown Brown Books hit the moment where the abstraction stopped being abstract. An order came in for an inscribed copy of Ray Bradbury’s “Futuria Fantasia,” the fanzine Bradbury made as a teenager, later collected and reissued. The shipping name included the word “SCAN.” Brown was willing to sell it; honestly, it was listed at $90. But he had known the man who once owned that copy, a customer named Tom. “I know Tom would not want that book sent to the guillotine,” he said. He found another dealer to fill the order with an unsigned copy instead. “If we’re going to save the signed copies, we have to sacrifice the unsigned.“

Then he said the thing that will stick with anyone who sells anything for a living: “I didn’t realize that I saw my job as selling to humans until robots started buying books from me.“

That the flashpoint involved Bradbury, of all authors, was not lost on readers. One WSJ commenter felt obliged to remind the early-morning crowd that Bradbury wrote “Fahrenheit 451.”

Where it goes from here

Anthropic now says its programs source from mainstream commercial markets and that “none of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” Zoom Books, the Canadian recycler whose name keeps surfacing in dealers’ order histories from Australia to Britain, insists it resells books intact and does not digitize anything, while declining to say who its customers are, citing confidentiality, according to Guardian Australia. Elon Musk waded in on X in late July, writing that he had asked the SpaceXAI team “to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning,” a stance covered by The Telegraph among others.

Those are all voluntary positions, which is the actual problem. As James pointed out in The Guardian, the United States has almost no legal framework governing the treatment or export of printed cultural material. There is no endangered species list for books. Nobody is required to check whether the volume going into the hydraulic cutter is one of thirty thousand or one of one. Destructive scanning, she noted, is both legal and less regulated than strip mining.

Meanwhile, the pro-scanning argument is not nothing. A book decaying in a warehouse, unread for twenty years, is not being preserved in any meaningful sense either, and a scan at least keeps the text alive. But it only half-answers the objection, because the point of Project Panama was never a public library. Google Books and the Internet Archive digitize so people can read. These scans exist to be tokenized and then, in a sense, forgotten, absorbed into weights nobody can open and browse. Alsup’s “one replaced the other” logic holds only if you believe a book and a training row are the same object.

Which is the quiet question underneath all of this. The used-book trade is having its best year in a generation, and it is coming from customers whose entire business model is to make sure the merchandise never gets sold again. Dealers are being paid, at last, for inventory the market ignored. They are also being asked, order by order, to decide what should survive, with no rules, no registry, and about ten seconds to think it over before hitting confirm.

Most of the time, five million copies of “The Da Vinci Code” is the right answer. It only takes being wrong once.