Several Danish antiquarian booksellers have rejected bulk purchase offers from a Canadian company, fearing the books would be used to train AI language models and then destroyed.
Broadcaster DR reported on September 16 that multiple Danish secondhand bookshops had received the same email from the Canadian firm ZoomBooks. The company asked to buy Danish-language books in large quantities. Anders Kjær Bruun, owner of Bruuns Antikvariat in Aarhus, said the message arrived ten days earlier.
Bruun told DR’s radio program P1 Morgen that the buyer asked to purchase in bulk, meaning quite large volumes. He said the company also assumed his shop had a loading ramp for large vans. He does not know how many books were wanted, but got the impression it was several hundred.
According to Berlingske, several other Danish antiquarian booksellers received the same approach. The booksellers suspect the mass buying is intended to supply training material for AI language models. Bruun said it makes no sense to import Danish-language books to Canada in order to sell them on the American market.
Fears of scanning and destruction
Bruun said he does not want to sell books for the training of language models. He described it as an unsustainable business to sell once or twice to a firm that then trains a model. He added that people would no longer need to read books if a model writes fiction for them.
He also fears the books would be destroyed, since spines are cut off during scanning. A customer who buys a work may do what they want with it, he said. Even so, he does not want to sell for destruction.
As noted by DR, AI companies need large amounts of data and examples of good language for their models. Old books are one source of such material. Danish is a small language, and digital text in Danish is limited compared with English.
ZoomBooks rejects the suspicion
In a written response to DR, ZoomBooks said its business model is to buy used books and resell them in intact condition. The company stated that it does not scan, digitize, split or turn books into pulp. It also said none of its data collection programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.
Bruun assumes the Canadian company works as a form of middleman. He believes it resells to Anthropic or other firms that carry out the digitization themselves. That assumption is his own, and DR’s report contained no confirmation of it.
The booksellers who received the email have declined the offer, according to DR. Bruun said the request stood out because of both its scale and its origin. He has not been told what the books would ultimately be used for.
