A secondhand bookstore in Spring Branch has stumbled into a mystery that sounds like it belongs in one of its own dusty paperbacks. Charlie Becker, whose family has run Becker’s Books since 1993, says his online orders have spiked this year, but not in the way any small business owner dreams about.
Most of the surge is coming from a single buyer who keeps having books shipped to a secondary location, and the orders themselves are downright odd.
One recent request asked for 70 different titles, reported ABC 13. Not 70 copies of one book, mind you, but 70 separate books, many of them about as practical as a screen door on a submarine. Among them was an instruction manual for a computer program that hasn’t been relevant in 35 years.
Becker says he tries not to pry into what customers do with their purchases, but when the pattern starts looking less like reading and more like harvesting, he takes notice.
AI Is Destroying Books
That suspicion lines up with a bigger story making headlines. According to the Associated Press, court documents revealed that at least one AI company has admitted to buying used books, cutting off their spines to scan the pages faster, then tossing what’s left after pulling the content for training its models. Becker isn’t ready to point fingers and say that’s exactly what’s happening at his shop, but he did notice something telling: the books being ordered weren’t available anywhere else online.
It’s a strange sign of the times when a bookstore owner has to play detective to figure out if his inventory is feeding a computer instead of a reader. Becker says he’s not against AI, and he’s certainly not against making a sale. But there’s something worth chewing on here about what gets lost when books become raw material instead of, well, books.
“I don’t think a lot of people realize that even if there is no big scary company buying and destroying rare books systematically,” he explained, “there’s still a background system that finds rare books and resells them, and they eventually can disappear or get liquidated because they don’t sell in enough time.”
Bookstores are places to enjoy literature, to walk among the shelves, and to preserve rare and older titles. Letting books be destroyed to feed AI doesn’t sit right with the shop owners.
Morals Tested
We appreciate that Becker isn’t running around with a sign that says the robots are coming. He’s asking a fair question instead: who decides which books get preserved and which ones disappear? That’s worth pondering next time you pass a used bookstore.
Maybe swing in and buy something odd yourself, just to keep a human in the mix.