Amazon Is Buying Old Books, Cutting Off Their Spines, and Scanning Them for AI Training
APPSO · wechat · 2026-08-19
404Media planted trackers in used books and traced them to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, where workers cut off spines and feed loose pages into high-speed scanners; the paper copies are destroyed. Amazon says it buys books through commercial channels to improve its products. Court filings from Anthropic's copyright lawsuit previously revealed a nearly identical pipeline.
Web text is abundant but increasingly contaminated; pre-LLM-era books offer clean, human-written, coherent long-form data that helps avoid the recursive "model collapse" documented in Nature. Out-of-print and niche titles are especially valuable since they were never digitized.
The irony: Amazon, which started as a bookstore, now floods Kindle with AI-generated books (it now requires AI disclosure and caps authors at 3 uploads/day, after fake books imitating Melanie Mitchell and Fei-Fei Li appeared). Booksellers in the UK and Ireland report bulk orders spanning unrelated genres with no haggling. Notably, the digitized copies stay in internal databases rather than returning to public circulation—once scanned, these obscure books may become even harder for readers to access.
Related event: AirTag Sting Exposes Amazon Destroying Rare Books to Feed AI Training(12 posts)→
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