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.
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 ofOliver 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.”
In 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, orscribe operator.