Amazon is facing fresh scrutiny over the use of physical books for artificial intelligence training after an investigation reportedly tracked a shipment of hard-to-find titles to a company facility in Las Vegas, where workers allegedly cut the bindings from books before scanning their pages and eventually destroying them.
The investigation, reported by 404 Media, involved placing a tracking device inside a book from a large order and following its journey across the United States. The shipment ultimately reached an Amazon facility associated with an operation known as VGT3.
The discovery has raised concerns among booksellers, librarians and readers about what happens to physical books once they are acquired as potential sources of AI training data.
I feel like we’re missing information from that summary:
They never list titles or condition of the books so I just assume they are the same books you can find in big piles at the dump mostly old text books and technical books. I love books I own hundreds of them, but people don’t buy enough 2nd hand books there are sites where you can buy books by the yard so you can have a neat and matching library, there are warehouses full of books to rent for movie sets. Noone realy cares they just want to be upset.
They are buying physically rare books from antiquarians with online listings. Those books are all out of print, or they’d just buy a new copy that’s readily available and surely cheaper. Rights are irrelevant because the entire point is to create a digital backup copy… in accordance with copyright law.
It’d be great if they could toss these scans onto the Internet Archive. But they can’t. Legally that’s the same as piracy, which is the whole reason they’re doing this, instead of just mirroring Anna’s Archive. That was their first whack and people were aghast. Funny how they’re not any happier, now that these companies are doing things “the right way.”
I do think piracy is better than destroying antiques. They could both pay for the books they copy and not destroy rare ones that might be unique. There’s no contradiction here.
Realistically that’s not going to happen unless they can pass on the physical books and/or their scans. They might bother paying for a basement-full-of-crates “library” if they got to put the PDFs online and brag about preservation. Same deal for dumping truckloads of obscure nonsense onto local libraries and loudly scoffing at critics of that let’s-say-charity.
But under the rules they have to follow, what they’re doing is obviously what they were always going to be doing. They only want one copy of each book ever mass-produced. They’re scanning them in the easy and fast way that also solves any legal concerns. They kept it quiet because people predictably flip out over this wide-but-shallow purchase.
Their actions are unlikely to change unless the legal situation changes. Let’s maybe change it for the better, for all of us.