Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders

It’s ugly. When there are still only some copies available of a certain book and they are all being sold the knowledge is gone. Let alone when it’s the only copy remaining.

That is of course not totally true, the copies are in private digital stores.

But for general public the knowledge is gone. Someone researching let’s say the history of a little village won’t be able to catch it.

This happens as well in current private collections. The physical book gets stored in a private book collection. But many also get out by the years when people are moving or die.

The amount of companies doing this is the real harm. There will be many companies running this process. It is absolutely not comparable to a single book collection getting burned in a house fire or being thrown away instead of donated to a second hand store.

It might feel for some as a not really big issue but actually it is in time.

> A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects.

Canada is one of the few “western” countries without annoying customs duty/tariff requirements to ship to by post these days. US is a mess, and UK/Europe are going in the same direction.

This mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.

Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.

All the offense is that books are being destroyed. They're being destroyed b/c that's slicing off the binding to get flat pages is most convenient way to scan them. But ... could AI firms sidestep all the vitriol by paying to rebind the guillotined pages? I have no experience with such things, but if they were willing get the machines to do paperback thermal bindings (even if they sliced open a hardcover) and then donate or resell the books back into the marketplace, a lot of the "destroying rare books" emotions could be avoided.

I mean aren't thry literally just digitally scanning books that basically nobody else has?

I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost.

Rumors of rare books being destroyed would be the bad part of this but if "rare" is the tourist guide to a local cave why should we care?

Feels alot like the water argument

How are they finding these books to order? I can't find used bookstores online anywhere.

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For those wondering why she's wearing wool and gloves indoors - New Zealanders typically can't afford electric heating, and wear woolen clothing in doors to to make up for this, when they can't burn firewood or coal.