Episode #569: What the Romans Wrote Over, and What AI Is Erasing Now

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Charlie D. Becker, a second-generation bookseller whose family runs Houston's largest used and rare bookstore, to unpack the viral tweet that had people convinced AI companies were secretly buying up used books to train their models. Charlie walks through what he actually found in his own warehouse orders, why the more likely explanation is old-fashioned reseller arbitrage and FBA "bookjacking" rather than AI training data, and how that story connects to the real, well-documented case of Anthropic scanning and destroying physical books for legal reasons. From there the conversation moves into the difference between rare and valuable books, the discoverability problem in the used book market, historical parallels like palimpsests and lost texts, his own AI tool for used bookstores, and broader questions about wealthy patronage funding independent research and passion projects. For more, check out Charlie's personal site at charliedbecker.com and his Substack at charliebecker.substack.com.

Timestamps

00:00 Stewart introduces Charlie D. Becker, a second generation bookseller building an AI tool for used bookstores and discusses Anthropic's controversial book acquisition practices

05:00 Charlie explains how Anthropic legally destroyed physical books by slicing spines to scan them, avoiding copyright violations while building training datasets for AI models

10:00 Charlie describes receiving bizarre bulk book orders through non-Amazon platforms, initially suspecting AI companies but discovering evidence of sophisticated book arbitrage operations instead

15:00 Discussion of the banal explanation for mysterious orders: algorithmic resellers buying cheap books from obscure platforms to flip on Amazon through FBA warehouses

20:00 Stewart and Charlie explore historical parallels between the printing press era and today's digital transition, discussing the loss of archival records and palimpsests

25:00 Charlie emphasizes the discoverability problem for rare obscure books and how profit-driven algorithms prevent people from finding books unless they know exactly what to search for

30:00 Detailed explanation of Charlie's AI cataloging tool that creates bibliographic profiles from photos of pre-1970 books lacking ISBNs, addressing the hard problem of metadata creation

35:00 Discussion of the technical challenges solved: archival-safe removable stickers, RFID systems, and creating canonical records that become definitive sources for rare books

40:00 Charlie describes building copy-level databases beyond edition-level records, creating VIN numbers for books, and designing knowledge graphs linking works to editions and translations

45:00 Vision for navigable work-edition hierarchies allowing researchers to explore translation genealogies and linguistic families, solving problems Amazon has no incentive to address