AINEWS
The orders skip wholesale negotiation, pay full price, and mix a Connemara history with a 2018 driving guide. Booksellers say the US $1.5bn Anthropic settlement shows where this ends.
A Galway bookshop opened an email in May asking for roughly 5,000 titles. The list ran from a hardback History of Connemara to a paperback called The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA, a discontinued Irish savings scheme, shelved next to Pass Your Driving Test 2018. No haggling, no wholesale discount, no obvious reason to bundle the high-quality non-fiction with the long-tail remainder stock. Owner Tomás Kenny called the order "bananas" in the Irish Times.
That is not a wholesale customer. Wholesale buyers negotiate, take the deep-discount titles, and do not ask for both at the same price. The Galway pattern, and a similar one crossing Berlin antiquarian shops overnight, has European booksellers pointing to a single explanation: the books are not the product. The right to scan and destroy them is.
The orders keep arriving. Berlin antiquarian booksellers described overnight mass emails typically worth €10,000 to €50,000 (roughly $11,000 to $55,000 at recent exchange rates) for out-of-print and low-demand stock ordinary customers do not want. Urban Zerfass, a Berlin dealer, told the Irish Times he believes the activity mirrors a US programme. Kennys.ie has long served institutional buyers such as Asian universities building English-language libraries. The May order skipped the usual bulk-price negotiation. Kenny called that a second red flag.
Germany's Publishers and Booksellers' Association has already called the scan-and-pulp model "destructive." For indie shops, the orders are also a financial lifeline. Online platforms already take 20% of every transaction; a €50,000 overnight order (roughly $55,000) is a quiet quarter. The tension is the engine of the story: income now, existential threat later, decided on a single email reply.
The US playbook is on the public record. Project Panama, an alleged programme, disclosed in unsealed 2024 class-action filings, in which Anthropic allegedly bought and scanned millions of books to feed its Claude models, is the comparison point. The unsealed Bartz v. Anthropic PBC filings described the operation as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." Anthropic separately obtained millions of pre-digitised works via the LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror shadow libraries, with up to 7 million books routed through that piracy channel. The 2025 settlement over pirated material is the same number European booksellers have started naming: $1.5 billion.
Whether the European orders are linked to Anthropic, to another AI lab, or to non-AI institutional buyers is unverified. Anthropic has said its focus is on "less common" and high-quality books, and Snopes notes that whether other AI companies run similar projects is unconfirmed. The European fingerprint matches the US pattern on the points a bookseller can see: full price paid, obscure titles chosen, no haggling, overnight delivery. It does not match on the identity of the buyer.
For European indie shops, the math is now visible. A buyer paying full price for "less common" books while skipping wholesale negotiation is not buying inventory. The right to scan them, and to use that scan in a model whose output competes with the same bookseller's reading public, is what is being purchased. The $1.5bn US settlement is what that mechanism looks like at scale. The Galway and Berlin pattern is what it looks like when it arrives in Europe, one email at a time.