AI training with old books: An interview with a Munich antiquarian

Rolf Brehmer runs an antiquarian bookshop in Munich. In mid-May, the 83-year-old received an order from the Canadian company Zoom Books via the Amazon subsidiary AbeBooks, followed by two more in June. The assumption: A tech company buys the works, removes the spines and scans the pages. It then feeds the knowledge to an AI, while the destroyed books end up in waste paper. From Brehmer, AbeBooks ordered, among other things, a 1993 essay “The Secret Miracles of Traveling,” the non-fiction book “Ceremonial in Crisis: Disturbance and Nostalgia” from 1998 and an anthology of Goethe’s works and letters from 1987.

SZ: Mr. Brehmer, what type of books is Zoom Books interested in?

Rolf Brehmer: The orders are very variable; they include books from the cultural sector, German history, socialism, and crafts. This is not elevated literature, but concerns works that represent a people in their political actions and cultural consciousness. These are usually smaller, simple formats and brochures with a rather low selling price. It is gratifying for the antiquarian to have a buyer for these thematically different and unfortunately rarely sought-after books.

Recently it was often said that the tech companies robbed the used bookstores to feed their AI. 

This is complete nonsense. Because ultimately only one copy of a title is bought, some titles have many hundreds. In this respect, it is essentially not a destruction of knowledge or cultural assets, at least as far as tactile possession is concerned, but rather a gathering of all topics, each with the help of a single example. This has no real impact on individual antiquarian bookshops or on the entire “cultural stock of books”, and a comparison with the book burnings in the Third Reich is really nonsense. The real question is: What is the intention behind it when a corporation goes to the trouble of purchasing, scanning and then destroying millions of books?

What is your answer to that?

In this campaign, as in many other data collections, I see the danger that at some point a corporation or government will dictate the intellectual activities in the areas of literature and contemporary history to a population that is already heavily digitally controlled and thus influence cultural and emotional development – even to the point of monopolizing opinion control. These powerful corporations don’t do this for fun or out of love or respect for the culture.

You have refused to process orders from Zoom Books in connection with shipping to the USA. How come?

The costs would have been too high. And the tightened customs regulations imposed by the Trump administration made shipping impossible due to enormous customs requirements and the associated additional effort. I’m just a small antiquarian.

So you didn’t sell the books to Zoom Books?

Yes, because Zoom Books has set up a branch here in Germany due to rejection from many other second-hand bookshops. This meant that new and identical book orders could be shipped within Germany. In addition: For me as an antiquarian bookstore, someone who orders several books at once is first and foremost a good customer, a stroke of luck even. If such a purchase brings in perhaps 200 euros, it is a very good thing economically. The political or social intention is initially not relevant to me as a seller.

Recently, numerous media reported on the Anthropic company, which has to pay 1.5 billion dollars to authors because it illegally downloaded a total of seven million books. The company is now valued by investors at $965 billion. How do you feel about this?

I see with great regret that the company shamelessly takes the knowledge, exploits it and gets rich with it without having any rights to it. The trial is a confirmation that this powerful company has committed a crime – and has paid a too lenient sentence with its left hand.