Who gains and who loses
Start by establishing the flow. According to 404 Media's reporting a few days ago, book suppliers began receiving unusually large bulk orders. Facing that demand are schools and libraries already short on resources, left exposed as the volume they can buy on the second-hand market narrows. On the seller's side the arithmetic is different. An anonymous seller who spoke to 404 Media's Samantha Cole said the trade both brings in money and clears out old inventory that is hard to sell, while adding that they do not approve of the end use or of uncommon books being pulped.[1]
ISBNdb stood in the middle of that flow. The marketing page that has been removed argued that books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge structured in a way no web crawl can replicate, and said the world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf. In the update the company published, it says it does not train AI models and never has, that the page was a test of market interest and that no such service was ever brought to life. The difference between the two texts is this: one offers a service, the other says the service was never built. Neither says who the orders are coming from.[1]
What is written down and what is not
The only part of this argument that has been written down comes from a court file. The practice surfaced in January when documents exposed a programme inside Anthropic called "Project Panama", and the company reached a $1.5 billion settlement with authors. That figure shows where one cost was booked: to copyright holders, through litigation and in bulk. The cost booked to libraries and schools has no such counterparty; a contraction in the second-hand market sits down at no negotiating table.[1]
Taking a page down does not change that distribution. Three numbers would, and none of them is known today: who is placing the orders, how many volumes are being bought, and whether a scanned volume returns to library circulation. Once those three are disclosed, who stands at which end of the supply chain becomes arguable. Until then what remains is one seller's statement that they are both profiting and uneasy.[1]