Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
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We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked, but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many people speak. As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
“There are different types of value,” the bookseller said. “There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”
Scanning all the Books: The Work of Scribes for the Internet Archive
Anne-Laure FreantIn 1996, computer engineer Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive with the mission to provide "universal access to all knowledge." Today, that vision drives the methodical work happening in scanning centers where operators carefully digitize books one page at a time, preserving both the content and the physical integrity of centuries-old volumes.
The Internet Archive's approach stems from a fundamental disagreement with the digitization methods that emerged in the early 2000s. When Google launched its Books project in 2004, it revolutionized the scale of digital libraries but introduced a troubling trade-off: speed versus preservation. Google's industrial approach often involved destructive scanning—cutting book spines and dismantling bindings to facilitate rapid automated processing.
The Internet Archive chose a different path. "At the Internet Archive, we never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way, one page at a time". That led to the adaptation of machines and software to fit the very specific purpose of the Internet Archive, and to a job: book scanner, or scribe operator.
Just to be clear, the destructive method is faster and cheaper but given the tremendous resources of Amazon and the spectacular amount of money that has been spent and in many cases demonstrably wasted pumping up the AI bubble, that's not much of an excuse. Arguably even worse when you remember this is all going to train the latest of Amazon's crappy Nova series.
This was a choice they made, just like setting up massive fossil fuel power plants now rather than taking the time to increase nuclear and renewable capacity was a choice, just like stealing the intellectual property of countless writers and artists was a choice, just like rolling out products that weren't ready for prime time was a choice, just like setting up ridiculously at complex and deceptive financing schemes rather than growing the industry in a sustainable way was a choice.