A tracker hidden in a box of rare books ended up in an Amazon warehouse where the spines are cut off
A bookseller grew suspicious of an anonymous order for 1,000 rare books placed through the marketplace Biblio, and hid an AirTag in the shipment. 404 Media followed it across the country to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, home to a team called VGT3 whose logo is a Tyrannosaurus rex holding a book. Workers there told the site that book spines are cut off to speed up scanning, destroying the copy in the process, and that the scans are used to train Amazon's Nova models. Asked about it, Amazon said only that it 'purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.' The report was published on 17 August.
Why it mattersOld printed books are valuable to AI companies for two reasons: most of them are not on the internet, and all of them were written before 2022, so they contain no machine-generated text to contaminate training. The price of harvesting them this way is that a rare copy stops existing, and what it held moves off a public shelf and into a model nobody outside the company can open. It also means that anyone selling books through an anonymous marketplace has no way of knowing that they are selling to a shredder.
▶ Related video: 404 Media Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
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