HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Bookstores are filled with stories, and this one appears to be a mystery.<\/p>\n
Becker’s Books, which opened in 1993, is a second-generation bookstore in Spring Branch.<\/p>\n
But the owner said he’s recently been getting lots of orders he calls suspicious, and he thinks artificial intelligence has something to do with it.<\/p>\n
“Every corner you turn will shock you at how big this place is and how many books there are, and I don’t want to be held responsible if in 5.5 hours you come out dehydrated but happy,” Charlie Becker, whose parents opened the bookstore, laughed.<\/p>\n
It’s the type of place where book lovers spend hours browsing through stacks.<\/p>\n
So, when online orders started shooting up this year, Becker said he didn’t understand the plot twist.<\/p>\n
He said most of his sales have come from a single buyer who is having books shipped to a secondary location.<\/p>\n
Then, he said he recently got an order from the same company wanting 70 different, not just rare, but impractical books.<\/p>\n
For example, a how-to manual for a 35-year-old computer program.<\/p>\n
“We try not to be too precious about what people do after they buy the books; however, we’ve always taken the stance that if it looks like books are becoming too commodified, like people are buying them for reasons other than what you’d use a book for, we try to opt out of that,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press recently reported court documents show an AI company admitted to buying books, slicing off their spines to make it easier to scan their pages, then destroying them after using their content to train AI models.<\/p>\n
Becker isn’t sure that’s happening, but he did notice the books that were ordered weren’t available online.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think a lot of people realize that even if there is no big scary company buying and destroying rare books systematically,” he explained, “there’s still a background system that finds rare books and resells them, and they eventually can disappear or get liquidated because they don’t sell in enough time.”<\/p>\n
Becker said he supports AI and he supports making money.<\/p>\n
But what’s happening here brings up a bigger question, he believes, if you read between the lines.<\/p>\n
“Who do you think should make the decision over which books are preserved and which are sold?” he asked.<\/p>\n
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