Munhwadang, a secondhand bookstore that opened in 1975 in Galhyeon-dong, Eunpyeong District, northern Seoul, is seen on Aug. 29, 2012.JOONGANG ILBO
A U.S. book distributor is said to be seeking bulk purchases of used Korean-language books, echoing buying sprees in four other countries that are suspected to be driven by AI companies.
Experts believe AI companies are buying secondhand books in large volumes to train their models and then destroying them.
“A company that buys books in bulk in the United States and resells them” is how the sender described their employer in an email that Seoul Book Bogo, a bookstore and cultural space in Songpa District, southern Seoul, received in mid-August. The sender, who said they headed purchasing at an Arizona-based book distributor, wrote that the company wanted to buy used Korean-language books in large quantities.
“We are looking for suppliers that can regularly sell us general Korean-language books, such as liberal arts, literature and practical books for adults, by the pallet or the container,” the email said. A shipping container holds 50,000 to 80,000 books. The buyer ruled out comics and children’s books and offered to pay in advance, in dollars or won.
The buyer also asked two questions: “Could you introduce us to secondhand bookstores that can sell in bulk, in units of hundreds to thousands of books, or is there a way to negotiate a bulk purchase through your management?” and “Is there any unsold inventory in long-term storage or any donated books that could be sold in bulk to an outside buyer?”
Seoul Book Bogo opened in 2019 as a large secondhand bookstore, bringing 25 used bookshops under one roof to sell about 120,000 books. It stopped selling used books in 2024 and now runs as a bookstore and cultural space. However, it still ranks near the top of Google results for “secondhand bookstores in Korea,” which appears to be how the buyer found it.
A winding passage modeled on a bookworm runs between shelves of used books at Seoul Book Bogo in Songpa District, southern Seoul, in 2019. The city turned a disused warehouse into the country’s first public secondhand bookstore, which opened in March that year.KIM HYON-DONG
“We wrote back that we are no longer a secondhand bookstore,” said Kim Su-hyun, head of Seoul Book Bogo. “At the time, I just thought it was strange, but thinking about it now, it does seem that an AI company is buying Korean used books for training.”
The buyer and other officials from the distributor visited Korea from Aug. 18 to 21 and met with the operators of Yes24’s used bookstores. Yes24 had received an email similar to Seoul Book Bogo’s and arranged the meeting.
“This is the first time anyone from abroad has offered to buy used books in such quantities,” a Yes24 official said.
The visitors asked Yes24 not to ship books to them directly, saying they would arrange shipping themselves, according to Yes24. Bulk purchases of used books overseas have been arranged the same way, which has made it difficult to confirm whether the books end up with AI companies.
“We want to buy specialist books,” the visitors told Yes24. As in the email, they ruled out children’s books.
Books are displayed at a large bookstore in Seoul on Nov. 13, 2025.YONHAP
No deal has been made, as the distributor has not been in touch since the late-August meeting. Aladin, which runs used bookstores across the country, has received no such approach.
The distributor told Seoul Book Bogo and Yes24 that demand for Korean-language books was growing steadily in the United States. But taken together, the email and the Yes24 meeting raise suspicions that the books are meant for AI training.
When the JoongAng Ilbo contacted the buyer by email on Thursday, the distributor was still buying Korean used books in bulk.
“We buy one copy of each title,” the buyer wrote. “The number of titles matters more than the total number of books.”
An AI model has no reason to be trained on the same book twice.
The distributor is interested in nonfiction for adults, specifically academic and specialist titles, science, history and the humanities as well as business, economics, art and design, the buyer wrote. It does not buy comics, religious books, children’s books, study guides, magazines or books in English.
Books are displayed at a large bookstore in Seoul on Nov. 13, 2025.YONHAP
“Fiction is a low [purchasing] priority,” the buyer wrote, adding that the condition of the cover does not matter at all: “It is fine as long as the book is complete, with nothing missing, and readable.”
Similar buying has surfaced abroad. In the United States, a federal judge’s June 2025 ruling in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI models, showed that the company had spent millions of dollars on millions of print books, many of them used, which it scanned for AI training and then destroyed. A separate $1.5 billion settlement in the same case, over books Anthropic had downloaded from pirate sites, received final court approval in July.
In Berlin, even obscure used titles such as old driving test guides have been sold in bulk, and booksellers in Ireland have reported similar orders. In Japan, reports emerged last month that used bookstores across the country had been flooded with orders from unidentified buyers. The books bought there were shipped to the United States.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
