Comment by forestrywat
7 days ago
I worked in a bookshop. I know all about this. I've seen pallets of books with covers torn off so they can be reported destroyed.
Here's a bookseller describing some of the books, which he believes are going to middlemen who are playing a sort of arbitrage with the AI companies by buying obscure titles, reselling them, and tossing away anything that doesn't sell. https://charliebecker.substack.com/p/is-an-ai-company-buying...
The titles mentioned there are not rage-inducing: "The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995" and "How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991". 404 writes and article about book destruction, and then explicitly neglects to mention a single title.
I suspect that's because folks wouldn't react the same way if they realized it was computer manuals for Windows 3.1. Even more obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be paying a lot for these books, so it seems outlandish that they'd be buying valuable rarities, since the booksellers would know the worth of those copies.
Good reporting on this would have included sales prices, volumes, and titles.