Brandon Thomas DiSabatino is used to receiving unusual emails. DiSabatino is a poet, author, playwright, and the owner of Conveyor Belt Books, a rare and eclectic books dealer in Covington, Kentucky. A certain amount of strange correspondence is inherent in the business. But over the last two months, he has received two emails that stood out: each of them had a spreadsheet attached, detailing very large, and very odd, orders.

The requested books didn’t make a lot of sense, for one. “Some of which I didn’t carry,” DiSabatino explained to me recently, “and none of which were related at all. It was all over the place. There was no thematic tissue” connecting the attempted orders. There wasn’t much overlap between the lists, but both emails sought one specific rare book, a self-published work by the conceptual artist Chris Burden. The book contains barely any text; it’s mostly images of the artist’s work, and it is exceedingly hard to find. “There’s maybe one or two floating around on the Internet,” DiSabatino says.

DiSabatino had gotten a similar email from another company recently, also asking to buy the Burden book. And he’d received an unusual offer from a third company that appeared to be based in the Dominican Republic, offering to buy all of the books he had in stock—his store’s entire inventory.

“I looked up the people involved and it was all tech related,” DiSabatino says of the Dominican-seeming company. “The person who’d reached out to me was a digital strategist.” He declined to make the sale.

“What is reality… What is real?”

Another thing DiSabatino noticed about the emails with the spreadsheets was the name of the company attempting the purchases: Blue Angel. The employee supposedly requesting the books was named Crystal Kanemoto, who, DiSabatino deduced after a quick Google search, did not seem to be a real person. While I have not found that to be a real person’s legal name in any public records, DiSabatino has pointed out that the name corresponds to a chatbot on a site called Emochi—one with whom users are encouraged to have adult conversations. (Emochi’s parent company did not respond to a request for comment.)

DiSabatino was also confused by Blue Angel’s website, which boasts that it sells “high-quality industrial supplies.” On a page dedicated to its “products and services,” the company displays a series of photos without links, showing things like steel drums, modular offices, gravel, a Jeep Wrangler, and, for some reason, two close-up photos of trout eggs.

“We believe that once our company wins, we all win,” Blue Angel says on their website, under a heading labeled “Our Principle.”

“We treat our company as the Queen bee of the beehive,” the section continues, “and our goal as bees, is to empower our Queen and enrich our beehive by cultivating and enhancing the growth of the flowers that provide us with nourishment to achieve our goals. Our customers are like the flowers in the flower field that help bees live.”

The oddities and the emails from Blue Angel made DiSabatino recall a recent story by 404 Media about a similarly-named company, Green Parrot, which the news site found had shipped rare books to an Amazon AI training facility. As journalists from 404 and elsewhere have reported, companies are now buying rare books and feeding them into computers to train large language AI models, destroying the original copies. Anthropic, for instance, is set on trying to acquire as many books as possible—a secretive project that the company........

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