IT’S NOT THE BURNING OF THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA! IT’S NOT FAHRENHEIT 451 EITHER! IT’S ALSO NOTHING NEW!

Your friendly neighborhood bookseller here.

I’ve gotten over fifty messages this morning about the articles claiming that data centers are buying mass quantities of rare books, scanning them, and then destroying them.

Now, the bookseller and bibliophile half of me isn’t particularly concerned, and I’ll explain why. The author side of me, however, is here to tell you that yes, you should be upset—but you’re upset about the wrong thing.

Let me start with a brief history. Last April, one of the smaller venues I sell on announced it was partnering with Shein. A few days later, I suddenly went from getting three orders a month from them to fifty or even a hundred orders a week, all going to the same warehouse. This venue had always been a dud for me. Then, overnight, someone turned on the spigot.

What they were buying, however, was head-scratchingly strange. It was all old dead stock—some of the very first books I’d ever listed. These books had been sitting on my shelves, gathering dust, for more than twenty-five years.

Of course I was overjoyed. As you know, the economy hasn’t exactly been booming. People struggling to fill their gas tanks weren’t about to buy a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird from me. They needed to eat. I make my living selling Needless Things.

So these mysterious orders were an answer to prayer. I’m still paying off medical bills from my last Lyme disease relapse, and the extra thousand dollars a week meant I didn’t have to sell my plasma.

I know all the gentleman booksellers here in Atlanta, and we spent months trying to figure out where these huge orders were coming from. Since they started immediately after the Shein partnership, we assumed they were building a Chinese competitor to Amazon.

The volume became so large that one warehouse couldn’t keep up. The orders started getting farmed out to new warehouses and additional selling venues. Suddenly, these mysterious bulk purchases were coming from almost everywhere..

Only a few months ago did we finally get our first real clue to our mysterious benefactor. Instead of numbered warehouse codes, the new addresses began using project names like Project Blue Sparrow and Project Red Robin. They sounded suspiciously like data-center code names—and I guess we were finally proven right.

As many of you know, I’ve been deeply involved in fighting the nine data centers they’re trying to force on my little Georgia town. So you may be surprised to learn that I don’t mind selling these companies my books.

Here’s why you shouldn’t be mad either.

1. THE BOOKS ARE NOT RARE!

The alarming, attention-grabbing headlines “THEY’RE DESTROYING RARE BOOKS!” are doing exactly what they were designed to do—capture your attention, get you riled up, and make you angry. Welcome to the world of clickbait journalism.

The books I’ve sold to these warehouses are not exactly rare. Yes, they’re out of print. Yes, I may have been the only person on the planet with a copy, but that doesn’t make them rare. They’re more accurately described as the books nobody in their right minds wanted.

The overwhelming majority were stock I’d had for close to twenty-five years that were just taking up shelf space. I was thrilled to finally sell my copy of X-Ray Technology in Bulgaria Since 1949. Had I culled my inventory like a less sentimental—or less lazy—bookseller, it probably would have been donated years ago. What happens to donated books we’ll get to in a minute.

These are not first editions of major works on parchment. As one fellow bookseller perfectly put it: “These are our mistakes.”

Isn’t it wonderful when a mistake finally pays off? 

2. THIS IS NOTHING NEW!

Booksellers have, for at least two decades, been selling original copies of out-of-print and public-domain books to print-on-demand companies. Those companies scanned the books, reproduced them as cheap paperbacks, and, in many cases, destroyed the originals in the process.

The only real difference is that people were comfortable with the result because another physical book came out the other end. You can make the argument that the books we’ve sold to AI centers are also being preserved in another form. I’m not naïve enough to make that argument to my angry readers.

3. MOST DONATED BOOKS END UP TRASHED AND PULPED ANYWAY!

This may surprise people who think the books they donate to libraries and thrift stores live happily ever after, passed from generation to generation like family trauma or a cold sore.

Guess what? Libraries and thrift stores can’t keep every unwanted book forever either. Some are recycled. Some are pulped. Most eventually end up in the giant dumpsters hidden behind the building that customers never see.

You merely extended the life of your donated Harold Robbins paperback by a few weeks.

4. THERE WAS NO WAY TO OPT OUT!

When we finally figured out where these huge orders were probably going, we had very little choice but to fill them. There was no protest button. There was no “Don’t sell to AI” checkbox.

The only alternative was to start canceling dozens of legitimate orders, eventually damaging our fulfillment ratings and risking being kicked off the selling venue altogether.

5. THE SPIGOT HAS ALREADY BEEN TURNED OFF!

The biggest irony is that, by the time we figured out where these books were going, the orders had already begun to dry up.

By the time the articles and memes started making the rounds, the well had nearly run dry. I haven’t received one of these orders this week. Looks like I may be selling my precious plasma after all.

6. “IT’S BAD ENOUGH YOU SELL ON AMAZON, YOU SOUL-SELLING CREEP!”

Amazon was, for many years, the only game in town, and it’s still the biggest marketplace for used books and media. That was long before we learned about the conditions in some of its warehouses, and even longer before Jeff Bezos started looking like a bald Bond villain.

I didn’t make a deal with the devil. I made a deal with a devil in training.

You may ask, “Why don’t you just sell somewhere nice like AbeBooks?” Well, I do. Guess who owns AbeBooks? It’s Amazon. Find me a place where I can make a living that doesn’t involve schlepping with the enemy.

7. ULTIMATELY, THIS IS A BUSINESS!

Yes, I love books. Yes, I’d love to find every one of them a good home. But ultimately, this is a business—and a difficult one to make a living in right now. I sell things that people want but don’t actually need.

If ChatGPT offered to buy my entire inventory tomorrow, I’d probably take the deal in a heartbeat. Then I’d have more time for politics and puns.

If you really want to help your friendly neighborhood bookseller, don’t judge me. Buy a book. Just don’t go all Marie Kondo on me first.

8. THERE IS A REASON TO BE MAD—BUT YOU’RE MAD AT THE WRONG THING!

The bookseller in me can tell you, with great authority, that this is not the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It’s merely the destruction of a bunch of lousy-selling books that nobody wanted in the first place.

The author in me, however, is pissed as hell. If an AI company buys a public-domain book, scans it, and trains on it, that’s one thing. But if it’s scanning copyrighted works without the permission of—or compensation for—the authors who created them, that’s an entirely different discussion.

As Harlan Ellison famously screamed: “PAY THE WRITER!”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the only reason you should be pissed off.