Australian secondhand booksellers say they may have been caught up in an AI supply chain in which old books are scanned for their contents and then destroyed — a practice booksellers have described as ‘horrific’.
Among those raising the alarm is Tim White, who runs the independent bookshop Books for Cooks and is preparing his stall for this weekend’s Melbourne Rare Book Fair at Melbourne University’s Wilson Hall, carefully arranging dust-jacketed books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves. ‘Sometimes books tell you more than the content,’ he says.
For dealers like White, the book as a physical object is just as important as what’s inside it — a conviction that puts the rare and secondhand trade directly at odds with a process that treats printed volumes as disposable once their text has been digitised.