Is an AI company buying up all the used books? (I don’t think so, not this time.) | #103

Charlie Becker

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Is an AI company buying up all the used books? (I don’t think so, not this time.) | #103<br>But no matter what, the Library of Alexandria is still burning.

Charlie Becker<br>May 10, 2026

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I’m Charlie Becker, a second-generation bookseller building an AI tool for used bookstores out of my family’s store in Houston. This newsletter is a one-man “weekly magazine” about my journey building the second bookstore and all the things that come up or catch my attention in the process.

Some of the books we shipped out this week.<br>We paused sales last week when we got a single online order for 70 books. It was so unprecedented we actually had to call the smaller, slower marketplace platform it was placed on and ask, “How do we ship this?” because they only give us space for one tracking number, and all those books wouldn’t even fit into our biggest box.<br>I’m coming to you this week with some hot technology news from the world of used book selling—which is something I don’t get to say very often.<br>About two weeks ago, my family noticed something weird happening with our online sales. We sell on our own website and a handful of online platforms (think Amazon, eBay etc.). On the slowest platform we use, one where we normally make the least sales, we had been selling at 20 times our normal rate for the week. Even stranger, about 95% of those orders were going to a single buyer who was having them shipped to a different location from where they were based.<br>Most of our orders over the last 25 years of selling online have been one book, one buyer. You may sometimes get someone to buy a set, or two or three books. More than that is kind of crazy. In the last week, every order has been bigger than two or three.<br>When we got the single order for 70 books, we paused all orders because we couldn’t fulfill it and we didn’t really know what was going on. About a week later, I noticed that on bookseller subreddits, Amazon seller forums, Twitter, and other places all over the internet, other people were talking about the same thing happening. (I’m not going to comment on whether it was the same buyer, who the buyer was, or where they’re sending it, because I don’t want to break any terms of service for the websites I’m on. I can just tell you that our experience roughly resembles theirs. You can google and find the names yourself.)<br>What people kept noticing is that these books are going out in larger-than-normal shipments — and they’re strange books—stuff like The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995 or How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991—just old books people are never normally buying. Dead inventory. They’re all being bought by one company and shipped to a different location than where the company is based.<br>There are two possibilities. The theory that’s taken off like wildfire on Twitter is that it’s an AI company buying all these books to scan them for purposes of creating more training data for the algorithm. My theory, which is a little more mundane, is that it’s just simple financial arbitrage.<br>When we did the research on which books were selling and combed through all our orders, it was a lot of the aforementioned obscure books that aren’t necessarily rare—meaning these are books to which there isn’t a lot of information or surplus inventory, but people aren’t exactly collecting them or clamoring to buy them.<br>We discovered all the books bought from us on the slower platform were not listed by us on Amazon, for a range of reasons, but the books did have listings on Amazon. Most notably, all of the books bought from us had one of two things in their Amazon listing: either it was out of stock and said, “this book is currently unavailable,” or it had a price that was 5, 10, or 20 times what we were listing it for on the slower platform.<br>My theory of financial arbitrage essentially says that this buyer is exploiting this gap. Basically, if I’m that company buying all these books, it’s just a financial decision. They’re just sending the money out and purchasing these books based on some kind of algorithm that sees discrepancies in listing or availability between platforms. For them, it’s just a number.<br>That brings us to the other place these books are getting sent. If you’re a used book seller on Amazon, you have two options for listing. You can do fulfillment by merchant (FBM)—when someone places an order, you grab the book, put it in an envelope, and send it to the person who bought it. Or you can do fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)—you label your books, put them in a box, send the box to Amazon, who stores them on a shelf, and when someone orders, Amazon fulfills the order. Remember how I said the company is buying and having the books sent to another location? From what I’ve seen online, the company ordering these books is sending them to FBA prep companies for the most part.<br>I have no proof that this...