Bookstores in Spain and other countries sell out-of-print copies to the mysterious Canadian company, which scans and shreds the texts to feed artificial intelligence models, generating alarm in the sector and concern over the loss of bibliographic heritage.
(24 May 2026) Tens of second-hand bookstores in Spain and around the world have begun to warn about an unprecedented phenomenon: the massive purchase of books by the Canadian company Zoom Books. Marçal Font, owner of the Fènix bookstore in Badalona, explains that the orders focus on Catalan non-fiction titles that had been stored for years and had practically no commercial outlet.
“I can receive seven orders in a row from the same buyer with a minute’s difference,” says Font, who suspects the purchases are made through an automated system. The practice is not limited to Spain: stores in Germany, the USA, New Zealand, and Australia have received similar orders, some of more than a thousand books, many out of print.
The selected titles range from editions about the castellers of Granollers in the 70s, to wine manuals, minutes of congresses from half a century ago, and diaries from the Civil War. “On average, they are books of five or ten euros, many practically impossible to find,” adds Font.
For whom is Zoom Books buying tens of thousands of books and sending them to a logistics center in the USA? According to several sources, the objective is to train Artificial Intelligence models before destroying the copies and recycling them as paper.
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