Bulk Secondhand Book Orders Surge, Possibly Linked to AI Training Data

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Secondhand booksellers are experiencing an unusual boom in sales, driven largely by mysterious bulk purchases. Experts and sellers suspect the books are being acquired to serve as training data for artificial intelligence models. Once digitised for this purpose, the physical books are believed to be pulped rather than resold or preserved. The trend has raised questions about the scale of data collection by AI developers and its impact on the secondhand book market.

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