Books are being mass-purchased from used bookstores across Germany. What's the reason?

The Hennwack antiquarian bookshop in Berlin was one of the first to encounter unusual orders. Initially, for several days in a row, orders for almost two dozen books arrived here. Then, a Canadian company sent a letter offering to buy half of the assortment, and later — all the remaining books.

The buyer was primarily interested not in valuable rarities, but in specialized editions: on mechanical engineering, literary studies, art history, and other narrow topics.

Hennwack believes that the buyer was acting based on pre-prepared ISBN lists. Since all books were paid for in advance, they were shipped without delay to the specified address in the USA. At that time, the bookshop did not yet understand who was behind these purchases and why they were needed.

It soon became clear that Hennwack was far from the only such store. According to Markus Brandis, chairman of the Association of German Antiquarian Booksellers (Verband Deutscher Antiquare, VDA), he is aware of many similar cases across the country. According to him, some antiquarian booksellers earned revenues of 10,000 euros, 20,000, or even 50,000 euros in just a few weeks thanks to mass sales.

The association's members themselves, according to Brandis, were not the main target of the buyers, as they primarily deal in old and valuable books. In mass orders, scientific and specialized editions from the second half of the 20th century were in highest demand.

Store owners note that, from a revenue perspective, this was comparable to the start of the academic semester and Christmas sales combined.

According to one bookseller, the mass purchases were made possible by Abe Books — a platform that has belonged to internet giant Amazon since 2008. On the one hand, it guarantees sellers instant payment; on the other, it opens the way for automated orders.

What Are Old Books Needed For?

There is no definitive answer to this question. However, many antiquarian booksellers and journalists link these mass purchases to the training of artificial intelligence models. It is assumed that books are first legally purchased and then destroyed after digitization. Such use may fall under the American principle of "Fair Use."

There were already grounds for such suspicions. In January 2026, The Washington Post in its investigation revealed details of Anthropic's "Project Panama." According to the publication, the startup spent millions of dollars on purchasing millions of books worldwide. They were cut, scanned, and used to train artificial intelligence models, after which the paper copies were disposed of.

Павялічыць

The existence of this project became known during the consideration of a lawsuit filed against Anthropic by authors due to copyright infringement.

Old printed books are considered especially valuable for training language models. Many of them are not openly available on the internet, so paper copies may be the only source of text. Furthermore, these books were written before the advent of generative artificial intelligence. As one Berlin antiquarian notes, these are "pure" texts, created by humans without the involvement of neural networks.

However, Zoom Books, in a comment to the industry publication Publishers Lunch, refuted the information that it digitizes or destroys used books for AI training. The Canadian company did not respond to Tagesspiegel's inquiry about these events. An inquiry to Abe Books also went unanswered.

Easy Money and Difficult Questions

Despite the unexpected profit, many German antiquarian booksellers are skeptical about such purchases. They believe that antiquarian bookshops exist for books to continue living in reader circulation, not to be destroyed after digitization. Therefore, they call the use of books for artificial intelligence training a morally complex issue.

According to the antiquarian booksellers, many authors also do not want their works to be used for training AI models, as they fear that these models will imitate their authorial style.

The Berlin bookshop Hennwack, which received an offer to buy almost its entire assortment, ultimately refused. The bookshop considered that this contradicted how they envision their business.

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