Amazon Destroys Rare Books to Train Its AI
Amazon Destroys Rare Books to Train Its AI
The News
Amazon is buying books in bulk, cutting the bindings off and scanning them to train its AI models — destroying the printed copies in the process, according to a 404 Media investigation published Monday.
404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg said the outlet planted an Apple AirTag in a rare book sold through the marketplace Biblio and tracked it across the country to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.
Employees at that site, which Amazon internally calls VGT3, say all they do there is receive shipments of printed books, cut them apart and scan them.
Amazon did not deny buying the books. "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use," a company spokesman told 404 Media.
Timeline
Booksellers who sell on Amazon reported an unusual spike in large orders shipped directly to the VGT3 location for a customer listed as "Amazon FC," and posted on a seller forum that they suspected a scam. An Amazon representative replied that the orders were legitimate.
404 Media reported that booksellers were seeing a historic spike in sales and suspected AI companies were behind the bulk buying — the buyers were not price sensitive and the title selection looked random.
One bookseller told 404 Media they had received an order of roughly 1,000 books on Biblio, and agreed to hide an AirTag supplied by the outlet inside one of them. 404 Media granted the seller anonymity, saying they feared damage to their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.
The shipment flew out of a California airport to Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, then went to a warehouse run by shipping company Trifinity outside Kenosha Regional Airport in Wisconsin, where it sat about two weeks. It then moved west by truck, passing Colorado Springs, stopping overnight at a travel center near Grand Junction, Colorado, and arriving the next day at an Amazon warehouse called LAS8 in Las Vegas.
404 Media published the findings. TechCrunch, PennLive, Cleveland.com and The Post Millennial followed.
Reactions
Amazon's statement to 404 Media did not address the destruction of the books, saying only that it buys them "through commercial channels" to improve its products and services.
Workers described the operation matter-of-factly on employee forums quoted by 404 Media. "I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books," one wrote. "Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the bar codes." Another wrote: "Working at VGT3 is nice all we do is scan books. It's so cool."
The bookseller who shipped the tracked order told 404 Media the loss is not only financial. "There are different types of value," the seller said. "There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value."
The Post Millennial led on the irony: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon to sell books, and the company is now feeding them into a shredder-and-scanner pipeline.
TechCrunch noted that 404 Media's report confirms Amazon is doing what large parts of the public have objected to, and that rare and out-of-print books are prized precisely because their text was never posted online.
What's Next
Amazon has not said whether it will change the practice, and the site is still operating. 404 Media reported that some employees worried earlier this year that Amazon would shut VGT3 down because it had worked through its stock of books and new shipments had slowed.
The legal ground is already partly settled. In an authors' copyright suit against Anthropic — which revealed that company's book-cutting effort, "Project Panama" — a judge ruled that scanning a purchased book for AI training was fair use, in part because the original printed copy was destroyed rather than duplicated and resold. The same judge found pirating books was not legal. TechCrunch reported that Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement was approved in July 2026.
404 Media said it is seeking more information from workers at book-scanning facilities.
More
Why paper books are worth the trouble: AI firms have already scraped what they can from the internet, and printed text — especially from books that are out of print, rare or in little-spoken foreign languages — is not online. Anything printed before 2022 also carries a guarantee no AI wrote it. Training a model on AI-generated text risks "model collapse," a recursive process in which output quality degrades.
404 Media said the scanning of barcodes and ISBNs before content supports a bookseller theory that AI companies are methodically working through the world's ISBN list; sellers said the giant orders never included the rarest books, which have no ISBN.
LAS8 is one of several Amazon warehouses clustered in the area, and mostly runs print-on-demand book production; the VGT3 scanning operation occupies its north end. VGT3's symbol, painted at the entrance, is a Tyrannosaurus rex with its mouth open, holding an open book.
404 Media did not publish the titles of the books in the shipment it tracked.
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