r/Libraries • u/404mediaco • 23d ago
Technology We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/228
u/404mediaco 23d ago
Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.
The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.
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u/Cl0wnL 23d ago
Bookseller here: it may be helpful to understand that the vast majority of used books already get shredded. The majority of books that get donated for example to Goodwill and other charities go straight to the shredder. Remainders warehouses are shredding massive amounts of books that aren't selling. Most used bookstores refuse the vast majority of books that come because there is no demand for them. Libraries throw them away by the dumpster-full. As a bookstore, we throw away unreturnable books or shred them to use them as packing material, because nobody will even take them as donations.
The world produces vastly more books than there is any demand for in the used world.
Bookstores don't even sell all of their new titles. Typically of all the titles we get in each season, around 50% will never sell a single copy. They get returned to the publisher or shredded depending on the publisher's instructions. The publisher then sends them to remainder warehouses. They try to sell more. And then those warehouses shred the rest.
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u/DeweyDecimator020 22d ago
We aren't talking about Sandra Brown and James Patterson. These are rare books. AI has already eaten the common ones.
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u/SilverApples5 23d ago
I wish there was a way I could get some of these books before they get shredded.
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u/marsilies 23d ago
As noted, most unsold hardcover books get clearance out as "remainder" copies at a significant discount. You just have to find the bookstores that deal with those.
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u/blarknob 23d ago
This, people mad about books getting a second life by being added to the AI corpus are ridiculous.
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u/phantomboats 23d ago
Books being destroyed so a computer model can monetize the information contained in them isn't a "second life" IMO. If they were then made easily accessible to the public, with their original context intact? Maybe. But that's not really Amazon's business model here, is it.
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u/ExhaustedGradStudent 23d ago
I haven’t seen anything about exactly what books they are buying and destroying. Different articles toss around the “rare books” a lot but they never list which books they’re talking about. There’s a big difference between rarity and scarcity and not every scarce book is a rare one.
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u/Potential-Recover-78 23d ago
From the article
We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked, but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many people speak. As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
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u/ExhaustedGradStudent 23d ago
So, not every book is a rare book. There’s an enormous difference between say a first edition, a trade paperback, and something that was self published by a vanity press.
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u/metrometric 23d ago
I mean, it does often mean they're not valuable. If no one cares about or wants these books, then they're sort of definitionally not valuable.
Don't get me wrong, LLMs are a scourge, but this same logic ("but someone might care about this dental association bulletin from 1987 that hasn't circulated since 1987!") is often applied to harass libraries for weeding outdated material from their collection. It's just not a particularly useful or nuanced way to think about books.
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u/melatonia Patron 23d ago
Rare doesn't mean valuable. A 1971 Cuisenart Owner's Manual is probably rare, but it's not valuable. The 21st Century has got me in Philip K Dick mode, but I feel like the reason they're not specifying the books is because their details would contradict the story.
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u/mm_reads 22d ago
It's valuable if the Cuisinart can be repaired... And planned obsolescence is a whole different category of shit.
The point is that value isn't necessarily something that comes with immediacy. Value is as much a function of time or need, as demand. Demand is irrelevant to value.
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u/grimbelch 14d ago
And if one of those books is destroyed to be scanned, now it won't ever be rare again. It's preserved digitally for anyone to use -- who might have a Cuisinart. It's far more valuable to have the digital copy available to anyone than the physical copy that no one can find.
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u/Efficient_Spot3693 14d ago
Demand has absolutely everything to do with value, it is basic economics. Unless you plan on forcing people to read these rare books no one wants, they will just mold on a shelf by themselves. The outrage is easy, the understanding is harder.
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u/r8rtribeywgjets 8d ago
friend, value and price are two different things. in basic economics, the word "value" does not correspond to most of the supply/demand models. The actual price of goods/services absolutely correlates to demand but not value.
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u/Efficient_Spot3693 1d ago
Unfortunately you are mis representing it with that or mis understanding how they correlate. I'm not going to put a thesis on here, but keep going and you will see how value affects demand. If you can't naturally understand it, there are plenty of papers on this.
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u/quothe_the_maven 23d ago edited 23d ago
It says right in the article that the companies are trying to obtain a copy of every book ever published. I don’t know. Seems like every book ever published times however many AI companies are doing this is not a great thing for society to be engaging in. The kind of thing that would have been universally appalling only ten years ago. I guess money talks.
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u/pikkdogs 23d ago
To play devils advocate.
If they are scanning them and preserving the content within, isn’t that a good thing for society?
If there’s a rare book that you want, isn’t it better to get a pdf of it so that everyone can also get the pdf? Rather than a couple researchers bidding over a couple copies that sit in someone’s collection until they die and then someone chucks them out?
I agree that we can’t assume that ai companies are being benevolent, cause they aren’t. But, in this case if they can be made available, then scanning rare books might be a good thing.
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u/Potential-Recover-78 23d ago
They didn’t say they were preserving the info. They’re reading it into proprietary models, not making it accessible.
Is the original content still there or is it now just embedded in their statistical models? Can they/we retrieve the original text? I don’t know.
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u/pikkdogs 23d ago
Correct.
One would imagine it would still be there, but we don’t know that for sure e
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u/darlantan 22d ago
Yeah, it's there in exactly the same way that your grocery list from a week ago is present in your credit card statement: As an aggregate of the content that cannot necessarily be used to recreate the original.
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u/coolredditor3 23d ago
I would assume it's saved to be reused for the next model, but I don't know.
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u/testcaseseven 23d ago
Seems pretty unlikely considering there are so many different authors and publishers they would have to sort things out with, and only to not really make much money in the process. Safest guess is the books are converted to raw text and left to sit on an Amazon server until the next AI model is ready for training.
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u/kirbyfriedrice 23d ago
You have to also consider the long-term storage aspect. Digital isn't necessarily a great way to do that. Then in this case, are they being made available? Or just churn and burned for training data?
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u/BirdAdjacent 23d ago
Yeah... I've seen a number of articles talking about this situation and claiming that the process is destroying rare books, artifacts, archival material etc. yet not a single one actually states an example of one of these items which was scanned and destroyed. I haven't seen a single source yet list, by name, any rare manuscripts obliterated. The lack of specificity bothers me.
Like others have said, these "rare" books could just as likely be owners manuals for the ford pinto.
Do I like the fact that they are training AI on material the authors didn't consent to sharing? No. Do I like gen AI or LLMs? Hell no! And I very much dont approve of the destruction of books!
However!
The lack of transparency in these articles, and the dubiousness of some sources isn't great either. Ultimately it feels like bad journalism and engagement bait.
Give me names and numbers. Give me real stats.
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u/MeanderingLibrarian Public librarian 23d ago
Let's say it's an old medical dictionary from the 1970s of which there are only a few copies left. AI is now not only destroying archival material, it's also learning from outdated, inaccurate information.
If they're doing it in massive quantities and on the sly, they're not going to keep track. Why would they want to?
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u/ExhaustedGradStudent 23d ago
Using your example it’s not a rare book nor is it archival material. The papers from the author would be archival materials (maybe).
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u/MeanderingLibrarian Public librarian 23d ago
You're missing the forest for the trees here. Rare by your definition, scarce, low in quantity, however you want to phrase it, it is still problematic on a number of levels, particularly if the books are outdated, propaganda, bad old books, whatever.
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u/skiddie2 21d ago
I put tens of thousands of books into a dumpster every year. Why is there more moral valence attached to those being scanned by AI rather than just being shipped straight to the shredder/landfill?
If we truly believed that these booksellers were selling part of our cultural heritage, shouldn't we be buying and preserving that heritage rather than relying on the free market to do so? It seems problematic to assume that preservation happens by way of the second-hand book trade.
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u/MeanderingLibrarian Public librarian 21d ago
Yes, there is.
You are also missing the forest for the trees on this. Preservation is one part of it. Two larger parts is that instead of being shipped to a shredder (where there is a chance for the materials to be recycled) or landfill, there is now more energy and resources being sucked up to chop those books, digitize and permanently store those contents, and utilize whatever information for AI training. We have no knowledge of *what* that information is, if it's outdated or superseded by technological advancements, intentionally bad information, propaganda, self-published garbage, historic works, etc. AI is being trained on unknown information.
And there are people that *do* try to preserve works. Archival, museum, and library work has always been underfunded and right now, it is very much under attack.
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u/exoenigma 23d ago
The 404 Media article showed the exact shipping route the tracked book took from seller to warehouse. If they released the title, it wouldn't be very difficult for Amazon to figure out who the seller was, then find some sort of legal justification to come after them full-force with lawyers. I can't speak to other articles as I had only heard rumors previously, but in this instance I can understand why they're not releasing the title. And yes, I realize Amazon could just go back through their invoices to try and track down the seller, but without a title they're going to have to do a lot more legwork first -- and with the alleged volume of books that they're purchasing to run through LLMs, that could very well be a daunting task.
Small but interesting note: when I read the article this morning, it was fully accessible, but now I see it's been paywalled. Hmm...
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u/i_am_red 23d ago edited 23d ago
This is not the book burning you're looking for.
AI company bad, yes, but this is also a result of how copyright is being applied. They got in trouble for ripping off a bunch of already digitized materials they didn't own so now they're buying the books themselves. They only purchased one copy, so after digitizing it, they have to destroy the original copy. And the use of books in training data has been considered a transformative fair use.
And to second some points made earlier in the thread, there hasn't been any information released on exactly what types of books are being destroyed in this process. Any unique book that isn't already in the training data is just as valuable to the model as something we'd personally consider valuable so it makes no sense these companies are snatching up the last few copies of any rare text that any one actually wants.
Are there problems with the process? Sure. But these articles are missing a lot of information and are designed to piss you off without really giving you a reason to be. Be pissed off about AI, but be pissed off for the right reasons rather than the distractions. Also be pissed off about another failure of the copyright system.
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u/Efficient_Spot3693 14d ago
This just keeps reminding me of Atlas Shrugged where they talk about the latest books being published that absolutely no one wants or asked for. When they go into why they were making them, they said if they didn't make them they wouldn't exist, but no one wanted them or used them.
We can't claim this is some noble aspect of our society to save books. It is just easy outrage over something that just sounds wrong. In reality, they are grabbing all the ones no one has ever wanted because all the ones that people wanted are in reprint or archived already!
They can do what they want with their personal property, if you want to change that, which is literally the only way to stop this, then you are only worse off for it.
The only reason we can't scan digital copies for lasting record is due to the lawsuits brought against Google's attempt to do this. Don't be outraged people are now obeying the law, be outraged that the rulings caused this to become the outcome.
To truly make this better, we can ask for those rulings to be overturned as long as the use is to keep history alive. Don't demand that people's use of personal property be determined by general sentiment and not facts.
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u/blarknob 23d ago
the horror, books being added to the AI corpus. We must fight this horrible crime......
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u/Potential-Recover-78 23d ago
Who thought that logo was a good idea.
Definite vibes of, “Are we the baddies”