The symbol for Amazon’s VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.
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.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.
The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.
In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”
📖 Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.
These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.
Another article to provide some clarity on the types of books: https://finance.biggo.com/news/37a2899b-5f1a-4571-9bb5-1156c0ac4605
Alright AI companies I can only hate you so much. Stop adding reasons to the list.
Look up Google and Project Ocean. Google already did this 2 decades ago. They even went to great lengths to build machines that would very slowly and gently turn pages and non-destructively scan books.
They already have a digital library of 25 million books just sitting there, ready to be instantly and non-destructively copied infinitely.No no, that’s too slow and slow is expensive. Time is money and we have to move faster and break more things in order to disrupt the market. /s
I mean yea that’s literally why they are destroying books.
The fact that their logo is a dinosaur destroying a book…
What’s the bet the logo is A.I. generated as well?
Look at the left cover. No, not the middle one; this book has three.
local AI companies are the reason Ukrainian book publishing industry experienced an uptick in sales lately. Bros stock up entire catalog at once and no one complains because its a hefty paycheck.
.> Local to… Ukraine? Why does this feel like a conspiracy theory? Ukraine, in the middle of a war, is focusing their efforts on an LLM, destroying books in the process?
Are you a plant?
They may very well be doing just that, but it’s really fucking weird to bring it up in a post about Amazon destroying rare books in the US.
Are we talking about 14th century handcrafted masterpieces or 2000s university textbooks? Do they destroy cultural heritage items or dusty low value sold-by-weight books?
I need to know if I have to feel angry and agitated or indifferent.
The latter. These are books that have been sitting on the shelf in a warehouse for years. They’re not sold by weight, but they are stuff like random technical manuals for stuff very few people care about.
My only hope is that an eventual lawsuit forces the AI companies to release the digitized versions to an archive or library.
Can they please give me an example of a rare book?
Are you skeptical that the books being destroyed are actually rare? Or are you skeptical of the existence of rare books?
Skeptical that the books being destroyed are rare.
Pretty sure information that is hard to come by on the internet includes rare books.
I really hope writers guilds will sue.
What’s their standing?
Edit: FYI in the United States we have a legal precedent called the first sale doctrine. Once you buy a book it is yours and you have the right to do what you want with it including selling it. And while they probably never anticipated a bunch of super wealthy narscisists buying a bunch of books so they could hoard the knowledge and then destroy them, we have no laws here that could prevent it.
If this was done by trustworthy organizations as an effort to digitize and preserve all the books, I would appreciate it. Maybe an association of libraries should do that and, to get the cost back, sell the digital versions / ebooks to the AI companies for an additional price). Then, at least, we would not loose the contents of those rare books to the AI conpanies and prevent them from obtaining a monopoly on the data. And each book would only get destroyed once.
But libraries/bookshops are probably not allowed to sell digital versions, and AI companies are not allowed to use borrowed ebooks.
Yeah. Libraries got in trouble during COVID for relaxing their ebook borrowing rules. AI companies don’t give a shit and are happy to settle lawsuits for a fraction of the money they take in from investors.
I don’t understand the concept of a “rare” book. Every book should be infinitely reproducible, the fact that they aren’t is a crime.
They only print a few dozen copies and then Google destroys the only one left.
It’s not a difficult concept.
It’s not like we’re printing books from old school printers where they had to assemble the letters by hand on a printing plate for each page, or they need scribes to hand transcribe books with a quill. It’s all computer. There’s no reason for any book to be rare.
There are many ways a book can be rare. First editions, signed copies, and books with little demand. Can’t fire up the printers and make those again.
In the case of little demand, I have a book “Two thousand leagues under the seas” not the more common “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea”. It’s rare in that it’s very difficult to find more literal translation than the version we are accustomed with. I suspect search engines simply think I’ve made a typo. Either way, why print it if there is little demand or can’t find the book?
But the actual words in the book can be easily recorded and don’t actually require printing.
A book’s value is not just held in its text. They’re also valuable as historical objects.
The text is what makes it valuable though? I guess there’s some value in, like, the actual literal physical copy too, but that has nothing to do with rarity. A bible can have historical value because of who owned it, but that’d be strange to describe as “rare” I think.
You don’t think a signed first edition of Moby Dick would be rare or valuable? O.o
A first edition has no value to me. The value comes from the words on the page, not the paper it’s printed on. I could see value in a book that was hand transcribed or something, but the fact that it was the first book out of a printing press is worthless.
I should say being signed is important, but that’s not really a rarity issue. That’s now a unique historical artifact because it was interacted with by a specific person. That’s basically the same as a bible having historical value because of who owned it.
ISBNs or STFU.
“Rare” means absolutely nothing without context. This is trash reporting, you sent the books, you know what they are, by not publishing the titles/ISBN it proves you know you don’t have a valid case. I’m betting these were mostly/all used books.
The pearl clutching about this is absurd. So what if they buy 1 of every book to scan?
I also wanted to know what the rare books are and this is what I Found:
https://finance.biggo.com/news/37a2899b-5f1a-4571-9bb5-1156c0ac4605
I also heard that they are also scanning old outdated medical books.
So are not really aiming for rare, they are just gathering at random and getting their hands on any old book they can find. Some rare books might or might not be in the books they scan.
I also heard that they are also scanning old outdated medical books.
What the fuck
Why would you want to train on outdated information? What the hell are these people smoking?
