A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
Independent booksellers in Europe are reporting suspicious, large-scale bulk orders of obscure books. These orders are suspected to be part of data-scraping operations by AI companies looking to train large language models.
Why it matters
This highlights the tension between AI development and intellectual property rights, as well as the impact of AI data acquisition on traditional retail sectors.
F rom Galway to Berlin and beyond, independent booksellers across Europe agree that something very strange is going on.
Last May Tomás Kenny of famous Galway book retailer Kennys received what he describes as a “bananas” online order for 5,000 books. But it was less the scale of the order that caught his eye and more its eclectic selection.
“Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA,” said Kenny.
Large orders are nothing new for the kennys.ie website. It was only the second bookshop in the world to launch a website in 1994 and it is popular with large institutions, such as Asian universities seeking to stock shelves in newly opened English libraries.
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