Instead of packing and mailing them out to eager readers, Amazon employees destroyed the books by cutting off their bindings to scan them. The story so far: An investigation published this week by the tech outlet 404 Media tracked a shipment of rare books to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.
Numerous other books have met the same fate, according to the report that ignited global outrage and criticism.
Amazon did not directly address its destructive scanning practices but confirmed that it bought books to improve its “products and services”, according to 404 Media .
Even so, the process of building AI models lacks transparency — by design. As AI firms transition from downloading popular books to shredding rare ones, readers and booksellers now fear the world is rapidly losing undiscovered works of literature.
For context, consider that media preservation platforms (such as the Internet Archive) as well as shadow libraries/piracy platforms (like Anna’s Archive) have been sued for doing the exact opposite: making digital versions of rare print books available to the public at no cost.
