August 10, 2026
Booked, busy, and deeply suspicious
A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
Booksellers cash in as commenters ask: secret AI shopping spree or weirdly good news
TLDR: Independent bookshops in places like Galway and Berlin are getting massive orders for obscure titles, raising fears that tech companies are buying them to train AI. Commenters are torn between "great, save and digitize the books" and "this is a creepy copyright feeding frenzy."
A Galway bookshop getting a 5,000-book order should sound like a fairy tale for struggling retailers. Instead, the internet has turned it into a full-blown mystery thriller: who on earth is bulk-buying forgotten titles like Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition with no discount and no questions asked? Across Europe, sellers are thrilled by the money but spooked by the possibility that giant tech firms may be scooping up obscure books just to scan them and feed them into artificial intelligence systems — computer programs trained by absorbing huge amounts of human-made material.
And the comments? Absolutely split. One camp is basically saying: calm down, this is a dream sale. Old stock is flying off the shelves at full price, and some readers argued that turning these books into searchable digital copies could even be a public good, much like Google Books. The other camp is serving pure dystopian panic, joking that AI has entered a new phase of "content psychosis" and is now ravenously gobbling every dusty manual in sight. The funniest running gag was that maybe all previous chatbot mistakes happened because nobody had trained them on that one random driving test guide from 2018.
Then came the sharper edge: if companies are willing to spend this big on books that already exist in major libraries, commenters asked, why not just go after every textbook they can find? That’s where the warm bookstore windfall starts to feel less cozy — and a lot more like the opening scene of a copyright brawl.
Key Points
- •Kennys in Galway received an online order in May for 5,000 books, described by Tomás Kenny as unusually large and eclectic.
- •The selection included obscure and outdated titles, which made the order appear unusual compared with typical institutional purchases.
- •Booksellers in Berlin are reportedly receiving similar overnight bulk orders for low-demand books, often worth €10,000 to €50,000.
- •Independent retailers view the orders as profitable in the short term but worry they may be linked to AI-related digitisation that could harm the trade.
- •The article cites a January Washington Post report about similar mass-book-buying patterns among antiquarian booksellers in the United States.