Few issues have generated more controversy in publishing over the past year than the news that AI companies have used—and in many cases pirated—millions of copyrighted books to train their LLMs.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed, with the most prominent of these, Bartz v. Anthropic, leading to a $1.5 billion settlement. Judge William Alsup ruled that it wasn’t the use of the books that was illegal, but how they were acquired: using the content of the books for training was “fair use,” but using books that were downloaded from piracy websites was illegal.

Now, according to a letter sent by Ingram Content Group to its client publishers last week, there is a "growing trend in the wholesale book market" in which AI companies are purchasing physical copies of books in order to scan and use them for training. E-books, on the other hand, are typically licensed for use, and are subject to the terms and conditions of the retailer, which often limits copying, printing, sharing, or reselling.

In the letter, Ingram addressed the issue and promised to honor the preference of publishers who may not want to sell books to AI companies. The company asked client publishers to fill out a form if they wish to opt out from having their books sold to an AI company.

Ingram acknowledged that it may not always be able to identify if the buyer is an AI company, but said it “will make reasonable efforts” to honor the wishes of publishers who don’t wish to sell to them.

The letter, which was sent last week, reads in full:

Dear Publisher,

We are writing to inform you of a growing trend in the wholesale book market: automated intelligence companies, including developers of large language models ("LLMs"), are increasingly purchasing physical books and other media, potentially for the purpose of scanning and ingesting content to train their artificial intelligence ("AI") systems.

These purchases may occur in the U.S. under the "right of first sale," which allows buyers to fairly use legally acquired products as they see fit, including for data extraction and model training. While such transactions are legally permissible, we recognize that some publishers/sellers may prefer to restrict the sale of their products for AI training.

At Ingram, we are committed to transparency and to honoring our clients' preferences. While we may not know the purpose of a given transaction, we will make reasonable efforts to honor your wishes. If you would like to opt out of Ingram knowingly selling your products directly to AI companies for model training purposes, please complete this form.

Please note that opting out will exclude your entire catalog from sales to AI Companies, and your opt out action will govern all future sales to AI Companies. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please email your Ingram contact.

Thank you,

Ingram Content Group