Japan's used bookstores are having their best sales month in years, and nobody's celebrating.
Japanese broadcaster NTV reports a wave of bulk orders hitting secondhand booksellers who sell through online marketplaces, with some shops moving hundreds of books a day and sales spiking fivefold on their busiest days. Nearly all of it funnels to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture, whose operator declined to answer NTV's questions. NTV also found records of a 50-ton shipment of Japanese books sent to the US, which it reports was headed for Anthropic's book-scanning process - though that link comes from NTV's own sourcing, not a confirmation from Anthropic. Separately, a bookstore in western Japan says it got an email from a foreign company asking about an order of tens of thousands of books.
The genre shift is the real tell, confirmed or not. Store owners say demand used to run toward novels and comics; now it's philosophy, history, law, medicine, and niche nonfiction like life in the Edo period - exactly the dense, information-rich text a company would want for training data, not casual reading. It echoes the mass book-scanning-and-shredding operations already documented at US and European AI labs, just relocated to a market where scanning copyrighted work for AI training is still legal unless a rights holder proves it causes them harm.
Bookstores get a temporary revenue bump; whoever used to own these books doesn't get a say in what happens after the trucks leave.