Book Haven

06/09/2026

We had a customer in the shop today who was raving about pip adam - and especially Audition but they didn’t know that Audition has been shortlisted this year for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction - so do check out the awards & check out pip’s words in the video for the award. In it pip says Audition is “…fuelled and powered by the energy and hope I feel for the abolition of prisons everywhere..."
The blurb about ‘Audition’ sums it up: ‘what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – and about how we live with each other’s violences – and imagines a new kind of justice.’
Congratulations Pip Adam Ursula K. Le Guin

01/09/2026

We’ve put it on the Book Haven blackboard: ‘Books are way better than AI slop!’ Please, with huge AI companies buying & destructively scanning secondhand books to feed their large language learning models, please do support your local bookshops and libraries!

27/08/2026

Friday 28 August is National Poetry Day - it’s a day to celebrate poets & poetry. At BookHaven got a sample of poets on our blackboard, literally only a sample of the multitude of amazing creative poets we have in this country. It may give you some tips & ideas of poets to dive into…
And we have 20% off our secondhand poetry (excluding those in the expensive catalogue) from today and all weekend!

26/08/2026

We got emailed a link to an article by Hana Lee Goldin about the destroying of books. Hana talks of three eras of destruction: first era of annihilation left ashes & knowledge of the devastation, second era of spectacle left photographs of the fires & the threat those fires were meant to carry, third era is disappearance. The destruction of books by burning was a spectacle of power, threat and control. The destructive scanning of books by AI companies is to disappear written heritage, to disappear knowledge from public into private profit for AI companies.

We’ve entered the third era of libricide.

21/08/2026

The destructive scanning of books to train Large Language Models (LLM) is "so wrong ... we want books for the good of humanity, not just to transfer knowledge for private profit going into building LLM machines." Book Haven doesn't want to be involved in the offshoring and transfer of local knowledge, especially indigenous, from the public domain to proprietary systems owned by powerful AI companies

21/08/2026

The media discussion about the bulk-buying of books by AI companies continues thanks to The Spinoff And at Book Haven we continue to get orders from AI companies, and the object of those companies is to destructively scan the books to train LLM.
The Spinoff talk about the "ethical & moral argument to be made against the destruction of books...No doubt second-hand booksellers, receiving bulk orders are finding themselves having to weigh up difficult decisions." For us at Book Haven, the key ethical issue is do we want to be involved in offshoring of knowledge for AI companies?
We see the AI destruction of books as a transfer of local (especially indigenous) knowledge from the public domain to proprietary systems owned by powerful US corporations. It's a transfer of knowledge for private profit. As a community we think we need to be asking about AI: who it benefits & who it harms? Who are the tech billionaires behind them? What are the long-term ramifications?

Second-hand book sales are booming… but who’s buying the books and what in the hell are they doing with them?

18/08/2026

In the news again, last night on 1News a story about AI companies purchasing books from Aotearoa NZ to train AI.
Book Haven's stance is we're not doing it, "We're quite concerned about the use of books in that way because in the process they get destroyed. The Information in the book is not copied and made available, but is ingested by the AI."
Renee from Booksellers Aotearoa NZ said, "All these books are written by humans, and those humans didn't consent to have their words and their creations training artificial intelligence."
Patent lawyer Zoe Dewhurst said if this was to happen here it would be a copy-writing infringement, but it is allowable in the US because of the fair use principle, "The court decision (Anthropic 'Project Panama') found that where they had purchased the books and digitised them and were using them to train the AI platform. that was probably considered fair use and allowable in the US."
The judge in that case, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s destructive scanning of books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed.... he said, "there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”

One seller said the orders were for non-fiction books published before the 1990s.

16/08/2026

In Book Haven this Thursday 20 August at 6.30pm we have:

Asher Emanuel
Lawyer and writer, author of the bestselling book The Valley - Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City

Harry Walker
Former Māori Welfare Officer and Cultural Report writer, author of A Voice For The Silenced.

Oliver Neas
Lawyer and producer of the podcast Undercurrents

14/08/2026

It's today! Finally it's time for us to welcome kluge to the world - Happy Launch Day pip adam!
It's today:
👁️ Friday 14 August, 6pm
👁️ Aro Valley Community Centre, Wellington
6.15pm hot chips and deep-fried vegan treats.
6.45pm Words from the wonderful publishers Te Herenga Waka University Press and then readings from Kerry Donovan Brown, Always Becominging and Brannavan Gnanalingam - and, of course, pip adam! Book Haven will be there with our bike cart filled with copies of kluge - note that there's a range of four covers to choose from - created by Todd Atticus.