Tracking Rare Books Leads to an Amazon AI Training Facility
- Reference: 0185021678
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/08/17/1644216/tracking-rare-books-leads-to-an-amazon-ai-training-facility
- Source link:
> Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was [2]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 404 Media in a statement.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
[2] https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
Re:So what (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe rare or unique things shouldn't be destroyed just to feed the Machine.
Re: So what (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of us think that certain things, such as preserving cultural heritage, are more important than profit.
I understand this is a foreign concept for many Americans, but there you have it.
Re: (Score:1)
Some of us think that certain things, such as preserving cultural heritage, are more important than profit.
And what are you doing about this, right now, to assure this is happening?
Re: So what (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Amazon account a year and a half ago, so at least I'm not helping to fund this wanton vandalism.
For another, I patronize museums and other cultural institutions, part of whose mandate is cultural preservation.
What are you doing?
Re: (Score:2)
I, for one, am doing almost as much as you are. I didn't cancel my Amazon account because once in a while it does happen that I need something they have and can't get it (legally) by other means. But at every opportunity I shop around and buy from independent shops, even if it costs more, just to avoid sending the money to Amazon. This practice is in response to the many evil things Amazon is known for apart from this new revelation about book shredding.
I hope we are part of a growing trend.
Re: So what (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean go ahead and have your cognitive dissonance wherein you are somehow not supporting Amazon by remaining a paying subscriber, and using their services when it suits you but only when it suits you, how very noble. Fine, lots of people maintain such illusions, but then posing yourself as someone who is doing the right thing and you hope more people emulate you is taking all of the piss. Boo this man
Re: (Score:2)
I am not a subscriber.
I buy maybe one or two things a year, only if I have to. I am only one tiny notch above giving nothing. You think there is no gain at all in significant abstinence from potential spending?
Absolutist thinking doesn't work well in the real world.
Re: So what (Score:2)
So youâ(TM)re saying that just because some companies have printed material in the form of books. and because you once had a job that you cannot conceive of the value of rare books for preserving culture? You are easily confused.
Re: (Score:1)
No. Their point is that how rare a book is matters, and also what the book is also matters. A First Folio of Shakespeare is not a 1985 car manual. And even when it is rare, that's not by itself enough. So what books are in question matters.
Re: (Score:2)
No. I'm saying that the vast majority of rare books are rare because they're shite. That's an even higher proportion when you're talking about rare books that are still in copyright.
404 won't say what books are involved. They won't even say what the single book was that they used for tracking. Probably because they know the destruction of a single copy of "Birth Control is Sinful in the Christian Marriages and also Robbing God of Priesthood Children!!" by Eliyzabeth Yanne Strong-Anderson, "Word Perfect 5.1
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What part of cultural heritage was unclear?
I guess all of it.
Re: (Score:3)
The part where you seem to think "rare" is a synonym for it.
Re: So what (Score:4, Informative)
The publishing industry is demanding this via lawsuits. Their position: you can not make copies. So if the book is turned into electronic form, then the physical copy must be destroyed. Only one instance of the text can exist. This has been a fight now in multiple lawsuits where AI companies were forced into paying for a physical copy of every book they scanned.
Re: So what (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, a rare book is likely to be old and therefore out of copyright.
Secondly, there are non-destructive ways to scan books. And then if the book is out of copyright and has cultural value, Amazon can donate it to anyone who thinks it's worth preserving, or at least digitize it and give the results to the Internet Archive.
If the book is still in copyright, but LLM training is considered "fair use", then Amazon can still sell or give away the book after it has been scanned.
Re: (Score:2)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (first editions, 1954â"55) â" Among the most valuable modern first editions; still firmly under copyright.
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopherâ(TM)s Stone (1997 UK first edition) â" Extremely scarce in fine condition and still under copyright worldwide.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) â" A highly collectible first edition that remains under copyright
etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Your examples are physical objects, whose texts are widely-available in less-rare printings. If someone shreds a rare first-edition Lord of the Rings, they have not deprived society of the cultural heritage of the text.
I'm talking about a rare book whose contents are not available in other printings.
Re: (Score:2)
I think they were somehow trying to prove that set B (rare books that are out of copyright) doesn't exist because set A (rare books that are still in copyright) exist. I can understand your confusion because the "logic" of that argument is bewildering.
Re: So what (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe no one else could afford to? Seems like tyranny of the wealthy to me
Re: (Score:2)
You should watch a movie called Equilibrium. The first half might appeal to you.
Re: (Score:3)
Or read Fahrenheit 451, by Bradbury.
Re: (Score:2)
I’m going to buy vintage muscle cars just for the steel so they can be melted down into bottle openers. Then I’m buying up all the 40 year old bourbon as cleaning solvent.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Re: (Score:2)
She's the last of the vvvvV8s! Sucks Nitro, Phase 4 heads, twin overhead cams.. 600 horsepower to the wheels
Shut the gate on this one Maxxie, it's the ducks guts! ...
Max: But it's a bottle opener. ..
Yeah she was melted down for scrap. shame really.
Re: (Score:3)
> Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
What? All [amazon or whatever] cares about is cost/benefit/profit. Old (and rare) books are cheap and [amazon or whatever] is already investing massively in data centers. The beast demands to be fed.
grey goo of Capitalism (Score:2)
some anonymous jape on teh intarwebs said :
> History will remember my name if I EAT the Mona Lisa!
Which is what these greedy out-of-control AI fuckwits are doing in a more diffuse manner.
There's [1]non-destructive ways to scan books [archive.org], that probably are just as fast as what these negligent morons are doing. It's just plain greed above all else.
This kind of behavior tells you who these people are. And why they should be shunned. It's starting to look like good people need to take action to stop their destructive rampage.
[1] https://digitization.archive.org/digitization/
Re: (Score:2)
Where the hell is the face palm emoji?
Re: (Score:2)
I think the article is pointing out two things: 1.) Amazon is training it's LLM's on copyrighted material and 2.) Amazon is destroying rare books that are obscure and hard to get, thus destroying knowledge. Most likely to cover up #1.
Re:So what (Score:4, Informative)
No. 2 is about complying with 1. See Bartz v. Anthropic; copying a book to train an AI is transformative, but one of the major reasons for that ruling was that the books are being destroyed when they are scanned. So the companies are being legally required to do this to comply with copyright rules. The other issue is that scanning a book without destroying the content is about an order of magnitude more expensive and slower. One doesn't need any malice or deception here. Just the normal incentives.
Re: (Score:2)
> but one of the major reasons for that ruling was that the books are being destroyed when they are scanned
Absolutely wrong. The settlement - not even a ruling - was that Anthropic had to delete the digital books it had pirated, because they were illegally obtained and so they were not entitled to keep copies of them. Absolutely no part of the lawsuit involved questions over the destruction of physical media.
There is no requirement that any of these companies destroy the books after scanning them. It's
Re: (Score:2)
You are confusing different elements. There was a settlement, and there were also connected rulings. See [1]https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf [copyrightalliance.org] From that order pg 16:
> Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others).
There are some prior other rulings which did go the other way about format shifting, with Capitol Records v. ReDigi being one example, but in this case, the ruling is explicit. Now, what did happen with the settlement is that there was some question of whether this would get overturned on appeal, a
[1] https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf
Re: (Score:2)
Again, the fact that the books were destroyed after scanning is not material to the law or any ruling. All that matters is they are not sharing the copyrighted works illegally; in the passage you cite, specifically, that the digital scans are not distributed to others. The references to the other cases (Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax) is solely to argue that if those cases were transformative and/or fair use, then their scanning of books is also transformative/fair use. They then argue that what they are
Re: (Score:2)
So, let me suggest tentatively that given that you weren't even aware this order existed until a few minutes ago, and thought that there was just a settlement should make you slightly less confident about this conclusion. And no, it isn't "basically of no consequence," the central point here is that they got it to be at least as transformative in those cases because they had destroyed the original. That amounts to saying that they were reasonably safe here in part because they destroyed the work. And other
Re: So what (Score:2)
It doesn't sound like it from this part you quoted:
"This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one)"
Please meditate on the meaning of the words "even more" before continuing.
Re: (Score:2)
Or you could read the whole case, including other elements such as on page 14 where they say "On the facts here, that format change itself added no new copies, eased storage and enabled, searchability, and was not done for purposes trenching upon the copyright owner’s rightful interests — it was transformative." The upshot should be clear here; there's little protection for fair use in general from scanning, but the protection is much higher if the scanned works are destroyed.
Re: So what (Score:2)
Hey didn't get quite the buyin they wanted on the original story so they manufactured this one by shipping a book to Amazon.
Re: So what (Score:2)
Well, certainly rare books!
Re: (Score:2)
I can't see past the paywall, but they didn't say they tracked a mass market paperback that was printed destined for a landfill, they tracked rare books. You can nondestructively scan the latter for preservation purposes, it just takes longer.
Re: (Score:1)
In corporate lingo... "Time is money lost... do everything as fast as possible".
Re: (Score:3)
Lots of mass market paperbacks are rare because they're crap, most of them got landfilled, and nobody has the slightest interest in reprinting them.
404 specifically notes that they're not going to tell you what books were involved. I'll bet you $100 that none of them were first edition Shakespeare though.
Re: (Score:2)
Also likely; having been to friends of the library sales I suppose not all of what has become rare is necessarily something to lose sleep over, but I appreciate that folks are keeping tabs.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd appreciate it if the people who've written a couple of articles about this actually listed some books. Since they specifically decline to do so I'm suspicious they're just riling up the credulous with vague claims about "rare books".
It is interesting that it's Amazon doing the book scanning. The world's largest book seller is buying up books to scan? Perhaps they're engaged in covering their asses before they get sued for training they've already done on the usual Anna's Archive collection, or maybe the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the clarification, Ayn. And may you burn in your libertarian hell.
Dreams of an anarcho-capitalist trillionaire (Score:2)
It's so terrible that we live in a society where we have to constantly negotiate and compromise to accommodate a wide range of opinions. Pluralism is terrible, I prefer the good old days when I was 6 months old and the world revolved around my personal needs. With no "government" telling me what I can or cannot do with my own property, where I could freely poop my own diaper (my sovereign property). It would be much simpler if I was the only human being on Earth, or at least if all the other humans owed me
Re: (Score:3)
The destruction of rare books is the issue. I'm 100% down with scanning rare books, preserving IP rights for the IP holder, and digitally publishing the rare books for the masses. That makes sense.
But they're not doing that. They're literally destroying rare books simply to scan them FASTER, minimize expense, and feed the AI/LLM. That's not okay.
Re: (Score:3)
Well they've done 95% of the work required to make the books available to everybody.
Perhaps they could be persuaded to do the last 5% after some competitive advantage latency?
If I had to choose between preserving the physical book and allowing access for a billion people, I would sacrifice the paper.
"It belongs in a museum" is really dated and felt to be wrong today.
Why isn't anybody else making these books available? That's the bigger question.
Granted, modern Copyright Law is ruinous to society.
The Google
Paywallled article but I don't see a crime. (Score:1)
This story is paywalled, so I haven't read it but If Amazon legally bought the books, I don't see the crime. We have book collectors buying rare books for their private collections that nobody will ever see except who is listed in the will and nobody is wringing their hands about that. People throw out books all the time. I had to do that earlier this year when doing some cleanup in the basement - college texts that nobody was ever going to read and that had gotten wet. I usually try to give the rest t
Re: Paywallled article but I don't see a crime. (Score:3)
Nobody said it was a literal crime. First sale exists.
If the books are rare, though, there's an argument to be made that destroying them is figuratively a crime against humanity.
Re: (Score:2)
> This story is paywalled, so I haven't read it but If Amazon legally bought the books, I don't see the crime. We have book collectors buying rare books for their private collections that nobody will ever see except who is listed in the will and nobody is wringing their hands about that. People throw out books all the time. I had to do that earlier this year when doing some cleanup in the basement - college texts that nobody was ever going to read and that had gotten wet. I usually try to give the rest to Goodwill.
Depending on rarity, importance, and jurisdiction, at some point, it becomes a crime.
Certain manuscripts, incunables, only editions, codexes and such. Also, artifacts of historical relevance (for example Thomas Jefferon's Qur'an)...
Again, depends on Rairty, importance and Juristidiction.
Full circle? (Score:3)
Amazon started off as a website where you could buy books. IRC it was for hard to find books. What a weird way to revisit their roots.
Re: (Score:2)
It's like they're returning to their roots! Or would be, if the phrase meant "go back to the place you came from and then take a huge dump all on everything you find there".
Re: (Score:2)
Precisely!
What does "rare" mean here, and other issues (Score:1)
One of the obvious issues here is what does "rare" mean. Do they mean genuinely rare books in the sense of old, unique books? The last time this sort of claim was being made it turned out that all the books were books being ordered with specific ISBN numbers. If a book is modern enough to have an ISBN, it is hard to see it as meaningfully rare for this purpose. These are at worse going to be things like a random sword-and-sorcery novel from 1975 or a car maintenance manual. These things end up with book se
Re: (Score:3)
I have a book that is one of 1000 ever printed. It has both ISBN 10 and ISBN 13 numbers.
It was a vanity project (a coffee table book) by the CEO of a public company - it was published under the banner of the company he ran, despite having absolutely no connection to the business of that company. Nevertheless, it's a historic record.
I doubt there are many of these books left.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like more information about that as well. Plenty of people in here are talking about rarities on the scale of a private printing / Shakespeare's First Folio / the Mona Lisa, but we all know (I hope we all know?) that's not what's being discussed here.
The AI companies aren't paying $$$/$$$$ for true antiquities. Rather, they're buying anything and everything for sale for pennies per copy by the pound / pallet. If something moderately uncommon (as in maybe worth $20, vs less than the cost of shipping ea
What's the outrage supposed to be, exactly? (Score:1)
If they acquired the books legally, they can destroy them as they see fit. It doesn't matter if the books are "rare" (says who?) - or not.
What's more concerning to me, is that people are trying to suggest how Amazon should be allowed to handle their own property - which is none of the complainants business (that's called being an authoritarian busy body).
Re: (Score:2)
Please see my reply to hutkept (above).
Re: (Score:2)
> What's more concerning to me, is that people are trying to suggest how Amazon should be allowed to handle their own property - which is none of the complainants business
The public has plenty of good reasons to tell Amazon - and other companies - what they can and cannot do with their property.
What if Amazon bought your neighbor's house and then tore it down and paved it over, and now noisy trucks are parked their idling all day and all night. Still okay?
What if Amazon shredded the books and released the shredded paper into the air, and it caused breathing problems for people who lived nearby. Still okay?
What if Amazon had people with measles cough all over the books,
Is this in accordance with US copyright laws? (Score:1)
Just asking. I am sure Amazon asked all publishers and all authors for permission and pays adequate royalties.
Or maybe not?
Re: (Score:2)
This was a recent court case. The decision was that you can buy a book, scan it, destroy the original and keep the scan instead. What you can not do is scan the book, resell the original and keep the copy.
Format shifting is legal. You started with one copy on paper, you ended with one copy on disk.
The issue is "rare" books. If you were destroying the last physical copy of Fahrenheit 451 and hoarding the digital copy or worse sucking the word orders into the algorithm and then purging the text to save storag
Who could have seen this coming? (Score:2)
> 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.
I mean ... it did [1]win the 2007 Hugo award [technovelgy.com].
[1] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1109#:~:text=The%20raging%20maw%20was%20a
To all the whiners (Score:2)
Instead of rare books, let us rare video games or computers. Let's say someone bought a rare version of a Ninentendo system (an early edition) and said, "You know what, I'm going to see what happens if I apply a larger and larger force to it. Let's see how long it stays intact."
Mind you, they did a 3-D scan of the system so you can digitally see it, but the physical copy no longer exists.
How many of you would raise a stink at destroying it?
If not Nintendo, pick something you like and go back to its earlier
404 Media To Be Blamed (Score:2)
They knowingly took a rare book and fed it to the sharks, fully expecting the rare book to be eaten. And then when it got eaten, they are complaining about the sharks?
404 Media are the ones to blame for feeding the rare book to the AI companies with the expectation that it would be destroyed. You can't blame a shark for being a shark.
Get your pitch forks out and lets head down to 404 HQ.
Re: (Score:2)
According to TFA, they simply asked the reseller to include their tracker in a shipment of books that the reseller was already shipping to their client.
I think it's good to know what is happening in the world.
Re: (Score:2)
According to the fucking summary:
> placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data
AI Executive scanning (Score:2)
We should start scanning in AI Executives, to train the system. First, off with their heads, then scan and dump.
This is disgusting. Cancel Amazon Prime (Score:2)
I am disgusted by Amazon (of all companies) destroying rare books and have literally (honestly) just cancelled my Prime membership.
I encourage others who value mankind's collective knowledge to do the same.
Save Books. Fuck Amazon.
Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (Score:2)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
IIRC, in this novel, Google(?) shredded whole libraries and vacuumed the shreds into a vortex pipe where the multiple cameras did multispctrum snapshots and restored high-res pictures of the pages. One university library took a day or two
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel)
hydraulic shear (Score:2)
Amazon has hydraulic shears to slice the spine off the whole book in one go and then suck it into the machine.
I wonder what they did with the pages afterwards? Probably straight into a dumpster. Maybe your next Amazon package will be made of 100% recycled rare book?
What a country! (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia, Amazon sell book to you!
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you, full (no mod) points awarded.
Libraries and dealers trash rare books all the tim (Score:1)
ust because a book is scarce or rare does not mean it is useful or desirable. There are big city book dealers that throw out dumpsters of books every day because they are of no use to anyone. The same is true of libraries: they have to unload old books to make space for new ones.
There have been myriad books published by small presses, or self published, in issues of a few hundred. The information in them may just be pulled from better books, be medical quackery, pseudoscience, alien autopsy insanity, etc. N
Is Wildberries as evil as Amazon? Subcontract it! (Score:2)
Just asking for an imaginary friend who shops at one or both of their websites. But I was really disappointed the story didn't generate any Funny. So here's my two cents of humor? Is attempted humor a crime like attempted murder?
There's only one way you might be able to preserve your personal library for posterity: You need to become so famous that your library is stored as a historical artifact with reasonable expectations that future researchers will want to study it.
It's funny because it doesn't make any