Copyright'We'll buy 6,000 used books': mystery bulk orders hit Korean bookstores after Anthropic's scan-and-shred program
A KBS evening news report on anonymous bulk orders for thousands of used books at Korean bookstores went up on YouTube on Oct 22 and passed 8,800 views.
Kim Jong-myung, who has run a used bookstore for 40 years, got a call from someone who wanted "about 6,000 books" and asked nothing else. Used bookstores in Seoul and Busan and major chains got inquiries to buy one copy of every title, up to 100,000 books. One store received an email from a self-described U.S. book distributor offering to buy Korean titles by the shipping container. Asked by KBS, the company said it "hasn't actually bought books in Korea," then dodged whether it resells to AI companies and cut off contact.
The backdrop is Anthropic, which was revealed to have bought millions of print books, scanned them page by page to train Claude and shredded the originals. "Since the Anthropic case was known, I think they thought, 'this is a bit strange,'" a bookstore official said. Anthropic has acknowledged using English editions of some works by Korean authors such as Han Kang and Hwang Sok-yong without permission.
"Not getting permission is obviously a problem. We call it plunder," said Park Sung-kyung of the Korean Publishers Society, as publishers agreed on a joint response. Comments split: "Why shred them? Donate them instead," one read, while another asked, "Why is it illegal to buy books and study them?"
