AI Companies Are Buying and Destroying Used Books

Jessica Mendoza (0:05)

Earlier this year, something strange began to happen in the world of used books.

Melissa Korn (0:12)

A number of used book sellers were seeing really sharp increases in sales. Some of them would get 20 or 30 orders, one book at a time, all from the same buyer within the course of a day or two.

Jessica Mendoza (0:30)

Our colleague Melissa Korn is a Deputy Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal's media team.

Melissa Korn (0:35)

Others would get one order for 50 books or 100 books, and these are much bigger volume sales than they were used to. Some of them didn't really even know how to ship that many books at once. They had never needed to before.

Jessica Mendoza (0:49)

And what kinds of books were being purchased?

Melissa Korn (0:52)

First of all, some of these book titles, and the fact that these are books at all is kind of incredible, and the fact that somebody is seeking them out to buy is just as incredible. So we've got Cultures of Glass Architecture.

Jessica Mendoza (1:03)

Ah, indeed.

Melissa Korn (1:05)

Flow Wine 2012, A Year in the Life of Italy's Vineyards and Wines from 14 years ago.

Jessica Mendoza (1:11)

Real important knowledge there.

Melissa Korn (1:13)

Women in Television News Revisited.

Jessica Mendoza (1:16)

I wonder when they were visited the first time.

Melissa Korn (1:18)

I don't know. One of my favorites was Marriage Litigation in Medieval England.

Jessica Mendoza (1:25)

Wow. So we're not talking like Harry Potter series being bought in bulk here.

The books being ordered were mostly nonfiction about completely unrelated topics. And the orders were being shipped out not to individual customers but to warehouses. And did the sellers know who these buyers were? No.

Melissa Korn (1:51)

It was a mystery to the booksellers who was actually getting these books at the end of the day.

Jessica Mendoza (2:00)

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, September 8th.

Coming up on the show, the mystery that's tearing up the used book industry.

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Jessica Mendoza (3:04)

The used book industry is made up of a smorgasbord of shops and sellers.

Some have storefronts, some sell out of their home, some sell online through third-party websites. It's a sprawling, unpredictable market, mostly fueled by people like me, who simply love a good book.

Melissa Korn (3:21)

The booksellers are buying these books, you know, in the hopes that somebody comes along and has a particular interest in this little niche of the universe.

It's always been a tough industry. It has thin margins. The booksellers, they would sometimes get, you know, one or two orders a day, one or two orders a week, depending on how big their inventory was.

Jessica Mendoza (3:46)

So when these booksellers started getting these mystery bulk orders, were they happy at first?

Melissa Korn (3:54)

I mean, these were changing their financial circumstances significantly, right? Some have told me that they were doubling their revenue, so thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in new sales coming in.

Jessica Mendoza (4:08)

Word started to spread about these strange orders, and it became the talk of the town in bookseller circles.

Melissa Korn (4:15)

Booksellers meet at Antiquarian Book Fairs around the world.

Jessica Mendoza (4:19)

I love that.

Melissa Korn (4:19)

They have email listservs, there are message boards on the marketplace sites, on Reddit, and some started posting, you know, hey, I'm getting a lot of orders from this particular company. Anyone else notice it?

Jessica Mendoza (4:33)

Did any sort of patterns start to emerge?

Melissa Korn (4:36)

Yes. The booksellers, as they compared notes, realized a lot of these destinations were the same named companies that they had never heard of before, and now all of a sudden we're doing these bulk buys.

Jessica Mendoza (4:49)

Many of the buyers went by unusual names. Often, it was some combination of a color and a bird.

Melissa Korn (4:56)

So, Red Sparrow and Blue Finch and Green Parrot Project. One of the booksellers was like, it sounds like out of a 70s spy novel or something.

Jessica Mendoza (5:10)