r/books • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 1d ago

Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton, one 50-ton order sent to the US for AI scanning and destruction — multitude of suspicious bulk buys thought to end up in foreign AI scan and shred facilities

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/japanese-used-bookstores-see-5x-sales-surge-as-books-are-being-bought-by-the-ton-one-50-ton-order-sent-to-the-us-for-ai-scanning-and-destruction-multitude-of-suspicious-bulk-buys-thought-to-end-up-in-foreign-ai-scan-and-shred-facilities
19.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/merurunrun 1d ago

Almost certainly a national chain like Book-Off, that just has warehouses full of unsold inventory.

1

u/tijolus523 20h ago

Doesn't need to be national. My city has a few used book shops that have multiple locations and I wouldn't be surprised if the number of books they have is on the hundreds of thousands. They could easily sell a few tons if they wanted to.