Independent booksellers across Europe are raising alarms after receiving bizarre mass orders for thousands of obscure titles. Last May, Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop in Galway received what he called a 'bananas' order for 5,000 books—ranging from A History of Connemara to The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA—with no bulk negotiation. Similar patterns emerged in Berlin, where dealers report automated nighttime emails for profitable yet perplexing orders like 'Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition.' Suspecting AI-driven bots targeting only ISBN-labeled books, retailers fear these purchases feed into large language model training, potentially mirroring US case Project Panama where Anthropic spent 'tens of millions' scanning and destroying books for Claude AI. German authorities deem such scanning illegal under copyright law, while booksellers warn AI data collection could ultimately devastate their industry.

The practice appears to be shifting toward European collection points before shipping to the US, where fair use laws permit scanning and destroying purchased books. Berlin dealer Urban Zerfass believes these automated orders aim to fragment human critical thinking rather than merely train AI models.

Kennys' Kenny, while less philosophical, is equally alarmed, stating AI is 'terrifying our industry' and vowing not to participate in intellectual property theft through book scanning.