Japan's used bookstores report a 5x rush of bulk orders, with 50 tons shipped to the US

Online used-book sellers in Japan have seen an unusual surge in large bulk orders since around August, with some describing days when sales ran at roughly five times their normal volume. Nobody has confirmed where the books are going or why.

What sellers are seeing

According to reports compiled by Tom’s Hardware and others:

• Orders arrive from multiple buyer accounts across different stores, but ship to a single logistics centre in Okayama Prefecture.
• Buyers are concentrating on philosophy, history, political history, medicine, law and books documenting daily life in Japan’s Edo period, a shift from the novels and comics that normally drive the used market.
• Export records show that a group company of a major Japanese publishing distributor shipped more than 50 tons of cargo labelled “JAPANESE BOOKS” to the United States, possibly around 100,000 volumes.

The ‘scan and shred’ theory

The widespread suspicion is that the books are feeding AI training. In the process described in reporting this year, firms buy physical books in bulk, cut off the spines, scan the pages, and shred and pulp what’s left. The result is high-quality human-written text for training language models, and the permanent loss of the physical copies.

For common books, that may matter little. For rare or out-of-print volumes, where few copies survive, critics argue it can mean the destruction of the last physical record.

What isn’t known

The evidence has limits. As of now:

• no buyer has been publicly identified,
• no scanning operation in Japan has been confirmed, and
• the AI-training motive is an inference, not a documented fact.

Why AI companies want books

Books are among the most valuable training data available: long, edited, factually dense and written in varied styles. Much of the easily scraped web has already been used, and legal fights over copyrighted text continue in several countries. Buying physical copies and digitising them is one route companies have explored, which is why a sudden rush on specialist Japanese non-fiction draws attention.