The LLMs are hungry and only vast quantities of books can satisfy their appetite. This, according to second-hand booksellers in the UK, is why the sales of pre-owned books are seeing a sudden surge. The news follows the recent revelations about AI firm Anthropic’s mysterious “Project Panama”, which involves the large-scale buying and scanning of books, mostly second-hand — ironically, because the AI slop flooding the internet has rendered it a low-quality source of information and knowledge.

The fact that books of any kind are being bought in such numbers while the publishing industry is in a slump may seem, on the face of it, like good news. Look closely and it stands revealed as a false consolation. For, AI can only consume books through “destructive” scanning, a process that requires the spines of books to be ripped off so that the pages can be rapidly scanned and the remains recycled. This digitisation by digestion is an unfortunate fate for books among which, in the words of Virginia Woolf, one might encounter a “complete stranger” who could become “the best friend we have in the world”.

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Because that has, for long, been the main appeal of second-hand books. Collectors are right about the charms of old, yellowing pages and their distinctive smell, as well as the revelatory beauty of marginalia. It is also true that the second-hand book industry was democratising knowledge long before AI. But to browse through books once prized by others and to find among them a new love of one’s own has a special allure. At a time when algorithms are determining what is seen and what is ignored, second-hand books hold out the increasingly rare promise of serendipity.