Inside Amazon's Warehouse Where Books Are Spine-Cut and Destroyed for AI Training
404 Media · rss · 2026-08-26
404 Media published an anonymous interview with an employee at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, detailing how books are destructively scanned for AI training data. Reporters earlier traced a rare-book shipment with a tracking device to the facility.
The employee describes receiving books from everywhere — brand-new, library liquidations, University of London volumes, documents presented to UK Parliament, pallets of Japanese books — then barcode-scanning for dedup, cutting spines off with slicing machines, and scanning pages on 20+ high-speed scanners. Loose pages are tossed into gaylords, unrecoverable. Managers claimed it was "for Kindles," which the employee doubted given copyright issues. The process destroys rare and obscure books, reducing available copies.
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