Famous secondhand bookstore chain De Slegte has received a massive acquisition request from Canadian firm Zoom Books for 800,000 unique Dutch-language titles.
The request, which covers standard novels to high-circulation works, has been ignored by the bookstore amidst growing industry concerns over AI companies using intermediaries to gather clean training data.
Bulk orders trigger industry alarm
Books written entirely by humans are increasingly sought after by technology companies seeking text unaffected by machine-generated output.
Zoom Books has contacted independent booksellers internationally, including shops in Germany and the nearby municipality of Haarlem, asking for precise selections of obscure and specialized titles.
Scanning practices and legal rulings
Booksellers suspect these bulk purchases are meant to be digitized and destroyed, a method that gained attention following a copyright lawsuit in the United States involving Anthropic.
A American court ruling determined that destroying legally purchased physical copies for scanning fell under fair use rules, driving companies to search for older European collections.
Stores reject mysterious purchase requests
Zoom Books claims it is simply trying to expand its inventory of Dutch titles, though an archived page on its website previously featured a section labeled for training models.
Dutch booksellers say they have no intention of fulfilling the unusual orders, choosing instead to preserve their existing retail inventory for standard customers.
