404 Media Put a Tracker in a Rare Book and It Ended at Amazon's VGT3 Facility, Where Bindings Are Cut Off to Scan Books for AI Training
404 Media / TechCrunch / Hacker News·high signal
Emanuel Maiberg's Aug 17 investigation tracked a shipment of rare books to Amazon's Las Vegas warehouse VGT3, where staff receive bulk print shipments and cut the bindings off to scan faster — destroying the physical book in the process. TechCrunch corroborated the same day with the framing that the company that started as an online bookseller is now destroying rare texts to build training corpora. The pairing of the two stories drew 145 points / 300 comments and 93 points / 16 comments on HN respectively, making it one of the day's most-argued threads.