A Galway bookseller has raised eyebrows after receiving a suspiciously large book order that he believes may be destined for artificial intelligence training rather than actual human readers.
Tomás Kenny, who runs the well-known Kennys bookshop in Galway, recently received an order for several thousand books in one go. The long-standing family business has seen plenty of bulk orders over the years, but this one stood out as unusual from the start.
Kenny described the order as “scattergun” in nature, meaning the titles requested had no obvious theme or connection to each other. It was not a school, a library stocking up on a particular subject, or a business buying copies of one specific title. Instead, it was a wide-ranging haul across multiple genres and topics, the kind of selection that makes more sense if you are feeding a machine than filling a bookshelf.
The suspicion is that whoever placed the order is gathering physical books to be scanned and used as training data for AI language models. Tech companies and AI developers have been aggressively sourcing written material to train their systems, and books remain one of the richest sources of structured, high-quality text available. While a lot of this sourcing happens through digital means, physical books covering a broad range of human knowledge and storytelling are also valuable to those building these models.
Kennys is not just any bookshop. It has been a fixture in Galway for decades and has built a reputation that stretches well beyond the west of Ireland. The shop is particularly known for its secondhand and rare book collections, and it has a strong online presence that draws orders from around the world. That international reach may well be part of why it ended up on the radar of whoever placed this order.
The situation touches on a much bigger conversation happening across the publishing and creative industries right now. Writers, publishers and booksellers have grown increasingly uneasy about the way AI companies have been hoovering up copyrighted material without permission or payment. Several major legal cases are already underway in the United States, where authors have sued AI firms for using their work without consent.
For a small, independent bookseller like Kennys, the ethics of the situation are not straightforward. On one hand, an order of several thousand books is significant business. On the other hand, there is a real question about whether knowingly supplying material that ends up training AI systems sits comfortably with a business built around a love of books, authors and reading culture.
Tomás Kenny speaking publicly about his suspicions suggests he is not entirely comfortable just quietly processing the order without flagging what might be going on. It also highlights how AI is now reaching into corners of everyday Irish commercial life in ways that were hard to imagine even a few years ago.
The broader issue is that there are currently very few rules governing this kind of activity. Buying books is legal. Scanning them for personal use sits in a grey area. Using them to train commercial AI systems is something courts and regulators across the world are still trying to get their heads around.
For now, Kennys finds itself in the unusual position of being a small Galway bookshop caught up in one of the biggest technological and legal debates of our time.