By Megan Shand
“This is just Fahrenheit 451. This is book burning for greed,” says Dawn McLachlan, after a company reportedly connected to AI data centres put in large orders at the second hand bookshop she volunteers at in Aberdeenshire.
Multiple second hand bookshops in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire have been left concerned after receiving online orders for their books from a company that is reportedly linked with AI.
Both The Old Aberdeen Bookshop and Orb’s Community Bookshop in Huntly reported to The Gaudie that they received notable orders from Zoombooks, a Canadian company that has been at the centre of recent speculation around AI data centres. The company has reportedly been buying second hand books online in order to process them to sell in a digital format to AI training companies.
An anonymous bookseller from Orb’s said that she heard “what was happening from other sources, like on the radio and the TV,” before realising that she too had received orders from suspicious companies.
Reportedly, the large sizes of these orders and their variety indicates has made many second hand booksellers suspicious.
Chris, a bookseller at The Old Aberdeen Bookshop found an order of around thirty books to be “unusual” as it contained a variety of books that “you wouldn’t expect people would order in a bulk order”.
However, one thing that both bookshops’ orders have in common is that local history and culture books have been targeted. The anonymous volunteer at Orb’s reported the company ordered “local books that probably haven’t been digitised yet” and which were “rare”. Similarly, Chris told The Gaudie they had ordered “quite a lot of Scottish stuff.”
Citing her time working in archives, she told The Gaudie that in order to digitise books, they are “run through a chopper which chops the margin, and they’re left with a stack of pages.”
A volunteer said “it’s heartbreaking to think that these books have just been destroyed when they might have been very rare or even the last copy of that book.”
She said before she heard the reports of AI associations, “I didn’t mind selling it to them in the first place because a lot of Americans have Scots backgrounds,” but “For people who this is their family history, to think the books might just be ripped apart and then put in the paper recycling.”
Zoombooks denies links with AI companies, with their official statement being that they are “dedicated to acquiring, reselling, and recycling books, transforming publications into sustainable resources.”
Dawn says “They need to be asked, what format are you reselling? What is your storage mechanism – are you storing this in an additional format? Have you already captured this book?”
Talking on the vulnerability of second hand bookshops such as Orb’s, Dawn said that “It’s a hand to mouth existence that they run because they believe in it, and so targeting people like that is targeting some of the poorest members of the retail community.”
She says that “they’re targeting specialists so, for example, someone who might have lots of Scottish books. When all the books are gone, how do you keep your shop going, especially if you’re a specialist.”
