Australian secondhand booksellers are wondering whether they have been caught up in an AI supply chain that scans books and destroys the originals — after receiving waves of bulk, price-insensitive orders from a Canadian company that refuses to disclose its customers.
The Guardian Australia investigation published today found multiple vendors who received large, seemingly random book orders from a company called Zoom Books, which describes itself as a book recycler. The orders came through major secondhand marketplaces like Abebooks and Biblio, ranging from cheap paperbacks to rare antiquarian titles.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
A US federal judge ruled earlier this year that buying books, scanning them, and destroying the originals constitutes “transformative use” under copyright law. That ruling gave AI companies legal cover for a practice that is now understood to be widespread — and Australian booksellers say the pipeline has reached the Pacific. The question for New Zealand is simple: if Australian vendors are receiving these orders, are Kiwi booksellers next?
What the Booksellers Found
Delfina Manor, who runs Good Reading Secondhand Books in Benalla, Victoria, told the Guardian she received orders from Zoom Books in May amounting to three full boxes — roughly 30 to 40 books. “They ordered, paid in advance, and they didn’t quibble over the postage,” Manor said. She had to ask the company to stop ordering in such volume.
John Sainsbury, owner of Melbourne’s Sainsburys Books, confirmed a similar pattern. The orders were price insensitive and appeared entirely random — niche titles, bottom-end stock, decades-old books. In one order, a 1970s manual on soil mechanics sat alongside a book on New Zealand cycling champions, a collection of early Australian poetry from 1982, and a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.
The poetry book sold for $9 and had been sitting on the shelf for 20 years.
This follows our earlier reporting on how AI companies are shredding rare books to train their models, where a federal judge ruled the destruction was legal as “transformative use.” We also covered Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement over pirated books, which revealed the scale of book sourcing operations across the industry.
The Company That Won’t Name Its Customers
Zoom Books, co-founded by Manroop Gill, has been “expanding aggressively” in recent months, according to Gill’s own LinkedIn post. The company has denied that it destructively scans books.
“We acquire secondhand books and resell them intact. We do not digitize books,” a Zoom Books spokesperson told Guardian Australia. “Our priority is always reuse, and when a book can no longer be rehomed, it is responsibly recycled.”
But when asked whether it sells intact books to AI companies who then scan and destroy them, the company declined to answer. “Our commercial agreements require confidentiality, so we do not disclose or discuss our customers,” the spokesperson said.
According to 404 Media’s reporting, intermediaries are stepping up to facilitate the AI book supply chain, buying old books precisely because pre-2022 publications are free of AI-generated text — so-called “AI slop” — that would degrade training data quality.
Anthropic, the company whose court files first exposed the destructive scanning practice, told the Guardian it has never bought from Zoom Books. “Sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. “None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.”
Why This Reaches New Zealand
The booksellers who received these orders are in Australia, but the supply chain operates through global marketplaces — Abebooks, Biblio — that New Zealand booksellers also use. The Washington Post’s original investigation documented the practice in the United States. The Guardian has now documented it in Australia. There is no mechanism that would prevent the same orders from reaching New Zealand’s secondhand book trade.
New Zealand has no equivalent of the US “transformative use” ruling. Under New Zealand copyright law, copying a book for AI training would likely require permission from the rights holder — but the destruction of the physical object falls into a legal grey area. A book that has been purchased can be destroyed by its owner. The question is whether the scanning that precedes the destruction is lawful, and that answer depends on jurisdiction.
Tim White, a Melbourne bookseller preparing his stall for the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, captured the tension: “If it’s a $20 book of which there’s 500,000 copies in Australia, I wouldn’t cry. If it’s a book that has that storytelling element to it, or it’s a one-off, it’s horrific.”
What the Books Themselves Lose
The booksellers’ concern is not only about copyright. It is about the physical artefact. White described books as objects that “tell you more than the content” — provenance, marginalia, binding, the history of ownership. When a book is scanned and pulped, the digital text survives but the object is gone.
Gwenyth Todd, from Chatelaine Books, said she screens buyers to ensure books do not go “to the wrong home.” She has seen books she sold later appear as individually sold illustration plates — a different kind of destruction, but one that rhymes with the AI supply chain pattern.
Nick Dawes, who runs Grant’s Bookshop with an estimated 500,000 books in his warehouses, put it bluntly: “If somebody wanted to come and buy all my books and cut them up, I’d be unhappy at one level, but I’d be happy at another. But if somebody said to me, look, this is the only known copy, I’m going to cut it up, then I’d say, I think I’d rather not send it to you.”
❓ FAQ
Has this happened in New Zealand? No NZ bookseller has publicly confirmed receiving Zoom Books orders. But the marketplaces used (Abebooks, Biblio) are global, and NZ vendors list on both. The supply chain has no geographic gate.
Is destroying books you own actually legal? In the US, a federal judge ruled that buying a book, scanning it, and destroying the original is “transformative use” under fair use doctrine. In New Zealand, the Copyright Act 1994 does not have an equivalent fair use provision — but the physical destruction of a purchased book is generally lawful. The scanning is the legally contested act.
What is Zoom Books’s defence? The company says it resells books intact and does not digitize them. It will not say whether its customers digitize and destroy the books after purchase. Its commercial agreements are confidential.
Why are AI companies buying physical books instead of digital text? Pre-2022 books are valuable because they contain no AI-generated text. Training a model on its own output degrades quality. Physical books from the pre-AI era are clean data sources — and cheaper to buy in bulk than to license.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
A US judge gave AI companies legal permission to destroy books for training data. An Australian investigation shows the supply chain reaching the Pacific through global secondhand marketplaces. A Canadian intermediary refuses to name its customers. The booksellers who noticed are the ones who care about the objects — not just the content. Whether New Zealand’s rare book heritage is already in this pipeline is a question no one has asked yet. It might be time to.
