Some Japanese used bookstores have had days when sales jumped fivefold. Others are selling hundreds of books a day through online marketplaces. NTV Japan reported the boom, and the owners it spoke to are not entirely happy about it.
The suspicion is that many of those well-read hardbacks and paperbacks are headed for a scanner and then the pulper. Orders have been going to a logistics center in Okayama Prefecture. Several accounts are behind the bulk buying, but all of them ask for shipment to that same address, and the operator would not comment or answer NTV’s questions.
Fifty tons to the US
NTV found records of a 50-ton consignment of Japanese books shipped to the US to go through Anthropic’s destructive scanning process. It also heard that a used bookstore in western Japan received an email from a foreign company asking about an order of tens of thousands of books. Earlier reporting has described AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books in the US and Europe, and Japan now appears to be seeing the same pattern.
What people are buying is another tell. A Tokyo bookstore owner told NTV that novels and comics used to sell best. Lately the extra orders have been for philosophy, history, political history, medicine, law and subjects like “life and culture in the Edo period.”
A boom with strings
The owners are conflicted. Sales are soaring, but if used books are pulled out of circulation for good, stock and prices for their businesses will suffer. There is also the loss of important cultural works. And copyright: using protected works to train AI remains legal in Japan unless the scanning can be shown to unfairly harm the rights holder. With bulk operations this quiet, it is unlikely anyone is asking authors for permission.
