Amazon's Rare Book Scanning Operation Exposed: An AirTag in a Las Vegas Warehouse

A bookseller in the United States hid an AirTag inside a rare book and sent it to Amazon's book scanning warehouse in Las Vegas. The tracker traveled across the country, confirming suspicions among booksellers that AI companies were buying their stock in bulk and pulping it.

The warehouse, owned by Amazon, is called VGT3, where employees slice off book bindings to scan pages faster. However, this process means the original books do not survive. In fact, a shortage of books to scan was reported earlier this year among workers at the site.

A review of worker discussions revealed that staff scan barcodes or ISBNs before scanning the book, which provides further evidence for booksellers' theories about AI companies buying and destroying rare books. The premium on pre-2022 print is due to the fact that only human-written text from this period is considered valuable, as models trained on later machine-generated content degrade.

The discovery has sparked concerns among booksellers, with some arguing that Amazon's actions could lead to the destruction of irreplaceable rare and antiquarian works. Amazon declined to comment on the findings, stating only that it purchases books through commercial channels to develop and improve its products and services.