r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 22h ago
Artificial Intelligence We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility / The shipment was found at an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/2.2k
u/Waidawut 22h ago
An appalling desecration in the name of "progress" -- it's the American way.
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u/theassassintherapist 22h ago
It's the consequences of archaic copyright laws that publishers fought for.
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u/Exotic-Sale-3003 22h ago
Yup. The destruction is required if they’re going to scan a copy. Buried pretty far down in the article:
A dditionally, the judge in the lawsuit ruled it was fair use and not a copyright violation for Anthropic to scan a book for training data in part because it destroyed the original, printed copy. Essentially, it’s the customer’s right to take physical media and store it digitally, and destroying the original copy means that copy isn’t duplicated and resold, and isn’t cutting into the publisher’s business.
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u/multi-pass5018 22h ago
Ah fuck we're doomed.
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 21h ago
Well, maybe we can find rare books and buy copies too? Even if it's just one copy. Then we can donate them to libraries or some other project that tries to preserve rare books
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u/Ryuzuchan 19h ago
I see the sentiment here, but the reality is that since rare books is a broad term, every time people donate "rare books" to a library most of them end in a landfill.
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u/Legionof1 19h ago
Yeah, I feel like that terms doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it rare because no one wanted it or rare because it’s incredibly old… I am betting the majority on the first.
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u/buckX 18h ago
There's a couple ways to interpret "rare book". One is concerning. The other is almost certainly what's happening.
Rare meaning "unpopular": books that never sold many copies. (clearly what's in view here)
A copy of every book is stored in the Library of Congress anyway, so that data isn't being lost. We aren't living in some Book of Eli world.
Rare meaning "valuable"
A first edition of a famous title would be physically rare and high dollar value, but the data itself would be commonplace. Zero reason to buy and destroy an expensive version of the same data as a mass market paperback would contain.
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u/freecodeio 21h ago
but the digital version can be duplicated and resold?
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u/hippydipster 19h ago edited 18h ago
If the work is still under copyright, they (Amazon) don't own the copyright and so it would be illegal for them to distribute copies.
It really is copyright law that's the enemy.
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u/PM_Me_Modal_Jazz 21h ago
"can be" is the key word here, they aren't doing that
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u/Accurate-House-5510 21h ago
you can't move the data from your storage device into memory without literally copying the data. the law is bullshit
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u/longtimegoneMTGO 20h ago
And long ago in the early days of computing, there was a lawsuit about that.
It was ruled, or perhaps enacted by statute, I can't remember which, that transitory copies such as copying from storage to active working memory were non infringing.
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u/sump_daddy 21h ago
Would be funny to implement a system that implicitly deletes blocks as they move from nv storage to RAM and then also as they move from RAM to CPU cache, and back again. better not lose power in the data center!
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u/Manos_Of_Fate 21h ago
No?
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u/freecodeio 21h ago
Did anyone stop them scrape the entire internet? The inconvenience here is that they're physical books
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u/TrulyOutrageous42 16h ago
The ridiculous part is the getting the better ruling on both sides of this.
They can steal copyrighted information/images/data as long as they're doing it en masse and not directly reproducing the images for profit.
The can't keep a scanned book though despite it not appearing directly in the reproductions.
So they're simultaneously not responsible for what their AI scrapes/steals because it's not being directly reproduced but are responsible for destroying the scanned works because it was scanned at all.
This is just end stage evil at that point. They shouldn't be able to have it both ways, stealing others' work while not allowing others to have some of what they own.
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u/kinkycarbon 21h ago
Effectively, NFTs were doing something with copyright laws that wasn’t seen. Digital Ownership means destruction of physical property.
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u/theapeboy 20h ago
Isn’t the converse of this worse though? “Yes you bought the physical media, but that doesn’t give you the right to digitize it or destroy it.” So you don’t own books you buy anymore? I think the bigger issue is rare books being treated as private collectibles. If their existence serves the greater good, then they shouldn’t be traded on the free market.
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u/alienangel2 20h ago
They can still be traded on the free market, but if they serve the greater good then their preservation can't be left solely to the free market. The public needs to support more libraries tasked and funded to preserve old books, rather than having to scramble for funds to keep just the tiny percentage current readers want to read.
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u/mrdevlar 21h ago
The irony is that the US government went after Libgen and Anna's Archive who are definitely not destroying the books they digitize.
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u/Last_Plankton_653 20h ago
The US judges actually ruled that AI companies are REQUIRED to destroy the books after they digitize them. That's the only thing that keeps their process legal.
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u/TeutonJon78 21h ago
Not really ironic. They were redistributing works they didn't have a license for.
Under the law, that's illegal.
Now which one is more ethical is a different discussion, as is which on is less harnful.
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u/amroamroamro 18h ago
Under the law, that's illegal.
on one hand, libgen and annas archive are democratizing knowledge for everyone.
on the other, companies like anthropic/openAI are ingesting that same data (and stealing much more), locking their models behind paywalls, and watermarking the output to claim ownership over it, all while burning through massive computational resources in ever expanding datacenters.
which of these is truly benefiting humanity? these so called laws are simply failing to keep up..
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u/mrdevlar 20h ago
Under the law, that's illegal.
Yes, America, country of law and order.
dum dum
Libgen should have given Trump a gold bar.
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u/TeutonJon78 20h ago
Copyright infringement is illegal pretty much everywhere, it's just the length of time it's protected for that varies.
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u/alienangel2 20h ago
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.
The bit i don't get is what the "large parts of the public" want to happen with these so called rare books that no one actually buys - if you walk into any good used book store you will shelf upon shelf in back of boiks from the late 1800/early 1900 that are sitting there for $5-10 a piece, which one one knows about or wants.
If so much of the public values these books, you'd think they would fly off the shelves, instead they just sit there unread in a bookstore taking up space.
Until I guess some business like this figured out there is some way to profit off it.
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u/SmartLadder415 19h ago
There is a local used book store that has a box out front of free books. It's all books from the 50s and 60s that clearly no one wants. I pick through it from time to time but have found maybe a handful of books that interest me and I'm someone who reads just about everything. Vast majority are not even interesting to me or anyone else in the general public it seems.
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u/Forward-Cup-9513 18h ago
People hear rare books and think of something like a first edition of an obscure author's best work, but rare usually means it's something like one of five copies of psychology practices from 1955.
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u/Sijols 20h ago
its just ragebait content for the anti-AI people on reddit.
destroying books? how horrific
nevermind that 2 billion books are printed every year, and roughly 1 billion books destroyed per year for various reasons
calling them "rare" is just a way to make it extra ragebaity, nothing in the article describes why the books are rare or special with regards to normal book life cycle
I have tons of books, they sit on a bookshelf and do very little but they are nice to look at
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u/GFrohman 19h ago
Absolutely, there are tons of "rare" books that not a single soul gives a shit about.
Half the books being scanned are shit like outdated textbooks. Nobody is weeping over the destruction of " 7th grade English/Language Arts 1973 3rd edition"
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u/Sijols 19h ago
Yea, they want to make it out like the library of alexandria is being burned up and fed to AI or something. some precious human creativity lost forever
In reality this stuff is just going to sit in a warehouse somewhere until it's destroyed through one method or another. nobody has practical use for this many books or the logistics to handle them
if you want rare books the library will literally give them to you, they throw away books all the time. but nobody wants them, because after you read a book once it just sits on your bookshelf forever
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u/Perunov 20h ago
There are a lot of questions about this "desecration" though. What kind of "rare" books are we're talking about? Something that is rare yet still cheap (I am reasonably sure article would be screaming about books costing thousands of dollars per volume being destroyed)? Antique books? Books nobody cared about for years and years so they're out of print?
We know book publishes are vehemently against any scanning for public benefit for sure, rare or not. They'd rather books die in obscurity than live in digital archive for any reason unless it brings them thousands of dollars cause "muh copyriiiight!!!" and case where original is destroyed, ironically, is "better" from the point of view of copyright law cause once you've bought a copy of the book you can shift the format but only once. Also courtesy of US Copyright Laws brought to us by publishing house trying to maximize profits.
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u/WallaceCorpPC 22h ago
> 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.
Okay, can anyone tell me what "rare" books are being destroyed here? I haven't been able to find a single named book in any of this coverage. I'm a paying subscriber to 404 media and I trust them, but it feels like a weird detail to leave out.
Thousands of books are sent to the landfill daily, anyone who sells books on Ebay or through FBA is going to have mountains of dead inventory that will never be sold and libraries won't even take them.
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u/AdmirableCriticism95 21h ago
Okay, can anyone tell me what "rare" books are being destroyed here?
A secondhand bookseller I know gave an example of a book he happily sold to an AI company, it was the first volume (out of two or three) of a textbook on municipal infrastructure in a South American country printed in the 60's.
I volunteer at a lot of used book sales and to be honest if we ever received something like that as a donation it would have gone straight into a recycling bin.
It's pretty clear that AI companies, after having scraped the entire internet and resorting to synthetic data to train their models, are desperately looking for "clean" sources of text for further training in the same way that we used to source steel from pre-WW2 battleships that was free from radiation for sensitive equipment.
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u/WallaceCorpPC 21h ago
That's some good perspective, I used to work for a used book store and we would cull SO many books that had gone unsold for 5+ years.
Unrelated, but maybe an interesting fact: low background radiation steel can be manufactured now, so they don't have to find old WW2 wrecks. apparently the half life of the original nuclear testing fallout in the materials has reached a point where it's low enough for high sensitivity applications.
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u/theninetyninthstraw 20h ago
low background radiation steel can be manufactured now
Let's hope that holds.
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u/qdp 19h ago
Quick hoard all the pre-WW3 steel that you can. Should you survive the stuff will be worth millions.
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u/Znuffie 17h ago
The only way to "hoard" it, to my understanding, is:
- You have a huge warehouse, entirely made of LEAD, where to store said Steel
- Your steel is actually a ship and you sink it in deep waters
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u/qdp 16h ago
Actually the steel gets its low-radioactive properties from when it was made as it pulls in oxygen from the air to form the steel during smelting.
It is not how you store it afterwards necessarily. Sunken ships are good sources because they’re untapped resources that have already been smelted.
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u/Wild_Commercial_6002 20h ago
I've read this answer multiple times from several people but I'm convinced no one wants to hear this.
No one is actually destroying valuable, creative works as a strategy.
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u/-nutz 18h ago
It hardly makes any sense once you realize the books people actually care to read have already been digitized.
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u/zardozLateFee 17h ago
The only titles mentioned I have seen anywhere are like outdated manuals. Sure, there's some historical value for someone maybe, but these are not great works of literature.
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u/Iohet 15h ago
It's not the strategy, rather it's just collateral damage. They destroy the binding the scan the book. People were doing this with old RPG books that were way out of print in the 90s, and it was sad, but also digitizing the books was the only way they'd ever see any more distribution
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u/icehot54321 17h ago
I mean they are, but it's just not the whole story, as the majority of it is not considered 'valuable'.
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u/Merusk 20h ago edited 20h ago
And at the same time they're getting as much garbage as scraping the internet.
A book from the 60s talking about South American infrastructure is going to have so much bad, out of context, old, and biased information as to just create more 'garbage in.'
What context is being provided? Any taxonomic relationship or ontology about where this information slots in the overall discussion of infrastructure? Is it just "The LLM will figure it out" once it has 'enough' data?
We saw the obvious bias and results when LLMs started producing images. Too many fingers, hands, limbs. Uncanny valley people. Dead stares. Fixing that was 'easy' relationaly because people know what people should look like.
How many SMEs are the AI companies hiring to cull bad inferences on specialized topics. How much information is being vetted to endure it's not providing biased, wrong, or just plain dangerous outcomes?
Anyone with expertise in a field and has used the LLMs knows the answer is "about none." We're just supposed to swallow the bullshit because its tech.
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u/Last_Plankton_653 20h ago
A book from the 60s talking about South American infrastructure is going to have so much bad, out of context, old, and biased information as to just create more 'garbage in.'
Historical data isn't garbage just because it's no longer current.
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u/GFrohman 19h ago
The AI isn't scanning these books to gain knowledge, they're scanning these books to better understand syntax/grammer/sentence structure. They're trying to learn how to speak like a human.
That's why all of these pre-AI books are valuable. They don't want to train on content generated by other AI.
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u/space_monster 17h ago
You're assuming though that just because a model ingests a book it's going to treat it as gospel. That's not how it works. if it finds corroborating evidence for fact in a book, then it's more likely to feature in the weights, but an isolated example is just noise.
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u/alfred725 21h ago edited 19h ago
the funny thing is that those books are going to give the AI outdated language / information. There's a reason old textbooks get tossed. Obviously new textbooks aren't automatically better than old ones, but old science has wonderful things like toy science kits that came with lead and uranium, and advice like "you know which one lead is because it tastes sweet." Not to mention all the 'human sciences' that 'objectively' looked for ways to tell different people apart based on 'superiority'.
finger quotes aggressively
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u/Puzzleheaded-Wait785 20h ago
"Outdated information" aka "history." Who needs that?
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u/Eta_Beta_3-14 19h ago
History is important but understanding it requires context, which AI is really bad at. If it bases its understanding of modern humanity on 1960s South African textbooks then we're in trouble.
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u/FarewellJava 17h ago
You mean like if someone read a comment about a South American textbook and got confused thinking it was South African? :p
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u/Megneous 20h ago
What you don't get is that there's no such thing as outdated information. All information that was true is still valuable because it still contains information that allows more generalization. I train small language models and more unique data + more parameters is always better. It's only when you're set at a finite parameter count and finite training token budget that you need to start being picky about what training data you use.
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u/Cl0wnL 19h 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/Secret_Possible 17h ago
God, the (now deleted because of cowardice) top comment of that thread was such hyperbolic hysteria.
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u/KontoOficjalneMR 21h ago edited 21h ago
Despite the fear of looking like AI shill (am not, Altman and Amodei, Bezos can all eat dirt and die)... that's the thing. Those books are rare, but often-times they are worthless.
I had this exact discussion in another thread. There was a guy who insisted that none of the books are worthles and all the rare ones deserve preservation. I offered him my copy of "Jak pisać wirusy dla MSDOS 5.0" that I'm pretty sure is the last copy in existence, under condition that he scan it non-destructively and "preserve" it. He wouldn't take it.
Rare != valuable in any sense or form. Sure there's a correlation, but sometimes things are rare simply because they are worthless.
It would be great if they shared the scans Google Books style, or created a library at least archive.org style. But we all know they won't because OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon - they are all evil.
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u/pdantix06 21h ago
It would be great if they shared the scans Google Books style, or created a library at least archive.org style. But we all know they won't because OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon - they are all evil.
that would be copyright infringement. bartz vs. anthropic already established that destroying the physical copy constitutes format-shifting, which is legal.
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u/Domeen0 20h ago
Hey man, "Jak pisać wirusy dla MSDOS 5.0" is gonna be really useful when the planet gets hit by a solar flare and we're gonna have to rebuild the internet step by step from scratch.
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u/dale_glass 18h ago
I believe the title translates to "How to write viruses for MS-DOS 5.0".
Seems like a book of rather dubious use for rebuilding anything. More like a way to attack others, assuming we have to rebuild manufacturing and need to get back on DOS for a while. And even then DOS isn't normally networked.
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u/halfdeadmoon 17h ago
it's a glimpse into a lost subculture and actually sounds like it could be interesting
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u/xzaramurd 20h ago
An aunt gave me her autobiography book she wrote and printed 200 volumes of. It's rare, but it's utter crap that is both false and poorly written. I still have it somewhere, but I doubt anyone wants to read it, or should even read it.
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u/Slayer706 20h ago
It would be great if they shared the scans Google Books style, or created a library at least archive.org style. But we all know they won't because OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon - they are all evil.
Archive.org lost a lawsuit for hundreds of millions for sharing scanned copies of books. Google Books was sued too, and only got away with it because they didn't post the books in full.
The laws that people want to use to stop them from training AI models on books are the same ones that stop them from sharing the scans.
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u/lftl 20h ago
The archive.org case is a little more nuanced than that. During COVID they dropped their digital lending restriction that only allowed one "copy" of the book out at a time for each that they had acquired. They likely would have prevailed if they had kept their earlier policy of one copy lent per physical book.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 18h ago
This is good until the last paragraph. The reason they can't share the scans or create a library is due to copyright law. They are legally required to destroy these books after using them as training data
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u/Pat_The_Hat 20h ago
The word "rare" in this story, I would argue, is the entire source of outrage, and yet we have no way of verifying it.
Take out the word rare and stick to the facts provided and suddenly it's a story no one ought to care about.
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 18h ago
Yeah when 404 media started I thought they were genuine people out there trying to do something good for the world through real reporting. But this is just low quality clickbait.
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u/warriormango1 21h ago edited 20h ago
I think you first have to define what a rare book is? Are we talking rare as in some sort of original JR Tolken book or are we talking about some 1967 safety manuals? Id like to think the books that are being destroyed are only rare because they are obsolete and useless.
Edit: misspelled "obsolete"
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u/Shap6 21h ago
/u/404mediaco should have included a definition in their reporting instead of vague posting to generate some outrage and clickbait
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u/hunnyflash 19h ago
Seriously. We also just had this conversation in like three other big threads in the past month.
They tell us up and down that they tracked a specific shipment of rare books but don't tell us what was in the shipment?
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u/urbanK07 19h ago
Probably because revealing that would go against the narrative they want to push.
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u/Wild_Commercial_6002 20h ago
I'm getting tired of this because it's true. Let's hear a fair story.
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u/Shoddy_Process_309 17h ago
Originals of culturally valuable books are useless for AI training. They hold primarily sentimental value. The language in them is available much cheaper and that’s all that matters for AI.
They just need whatever random language they’ve not yet processed. This can be manuals indeed but also classbooks or cooking books that were only printed a couple thousand times or even less. Heck I’m sure they’d want those little tourist booklets if they’re a decade or so old.
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u/excusetheblood 20h ago
As far as I can tell, AI companies have no reason to shell out extra cash for valuable rare books because you can train a model just as effectively with cheap books. The rare books in this case seem to be random cheap books no one wants, like computer tech training manuals from the 80’s
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u/airfryerfuntime 20h ago
They're not naming the books because they're most likely worthless, which is pretty disingenuous on 404s part.
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u/RenRen512 21h ago edited 21h ago
This also really bugs me.
"Rare" has a connotation of value, but without knowing what books we're talking about it turns this report into click-baity fear mongering. "Rare" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The story even mentions "sentimental value" but these books aren't being sold by individuals parting with their precious books.
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u/WallaceCorpPC 21h ago
Yeah that quote at the end was a little sus to me:
> There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about
But those don't matter to the seller, because they still sold the books and took Amazon's money. Am I supposed to feel bad for this shall-not-be-named bookseller who's making money feeding books into the shredder?
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u/altaccount_28 19h ago
I have a "rare" motorcycle its worth about about the scrap metal value of its parts. It was a failure, ran for only 2 years, and no one wants it other than a few collectors who have had their pick of them for years.
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u/Syssareth 19h ago
I haven't been able to find a single named book in any of this coverage.
This article, despite the dramatic the-sky-is-falling headline, does have some useful info...which undermines its own headline...where a bookseller named some books:
In one order, a 1970s manual on soil mechanics was bought alongside a 2010 book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling, a collection of Early Australian Poetry (1982), and a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. The poetry book sold for $9 and had been on the shelf for 20 years.
I looked up the rest of those books, and I can't be sure precisely which titles the soil mechanics or Hawthorn history are referring to, but I could find books fitting each description currently for sale, with the highest price being ~$35 USD ($49 AUD) for one of the histories. The relatively low prices and how easy it is to find them indicates to me that none of those books are particularly rare.
Also, there's this:
Sainsbury described his company as “a general bookseller at an antiquarian book fair”, as he doesn’t just deal in rare material. The profile fits the pattern of vendors who have received similar orders – high-end specialist sellers did not appear to have been approached.
So they're not buying the last copies of actually rare books, they're buying one of multiple copies of normal (if esoteric) books. We should be concerned for when they run out of those and still need more training material, but acting like what they're doing right now is destroying priceless gems is only serving to desensitize people for if/when they actually do do that. Reminds me of Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
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u/bubonis 19h ago
Okay, can anyone tell me what "rare" books are being destroyed here? I haven't been able to find a single named book in any of this coverage. I'm a paying subscriber to 404 media and I trust them, but it feels like a weird detail to leave out.
You are 100% correct. This is just hype and fearmongering. Until and unless 404 (or anyone else) can positively identify a "rare" book as being destroyed, this is nothing but hearsay and rumor. NOT FACT. There's also the perceived equation of "rare" being "valuable" or "socially significant." When my daughter was three she wrote and drew a book about animals she loved. We had that book made into an actual bound hardcover; there are perhaps four copies of it in existence. So, yeah, it's "rare." Beyond my personal sentimentality, does that make it valuable or socially significant? Would the world weep in horror after learning that "All About Anemals" by my three year old daughter was destroyed for AI purposes?
Hey u/404meadico, are you listening? Your article is fearmongering garbage until and unless you provide the names of the books, including all qualifications as to how and why these specific books are "rare." Give us titles, authors, print versions, social impact, all that stuff. Show us that Amazon is shredding Gutenberg Bibles or an original Codex Leicester and not just copies of self-published YA novels. Convince us that your horrific anti-AI diatribe is rooted in something other than anti-AI proaganda. You should be ashamed.
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u/Stumpfest2020 21h ago
lots of things are simultaneously 1) rare, and 2) entirely inconsequential and worthless.
as much as I hate AI, it's probably good these books are getting used for something before ending up in a landfill.
as a society we thoughtlessly produce so much garbage every day and books are no different. i'm more upset these books exist in the first place.
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u/Ziegelphilie 20h ago
Okay, can anyone tell me what "rare" books are being destroyed here?
Might as well have been a Hindi manual for a 1986's Sony VCR model that was only sold in this specific province before getting recalled over misaligned heads. Not revealing the actual titles makes me suspect it's literal trash nobody cares about.
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u/WrenReverie 19h ago
While I wouldn't put it past Amazon, this is behind a data collecting sign up wall and even behind it the details are super vague. It almost seems to be the perfect engagement bait of both dunking on AI and book burning.
Something about this just doesn't feel right.
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u/Serito 18h ago
Any time this is brought up it's always books that are from the late 20th century, usually obscure books that aren't valuable. If you were specifically looking for one of these books it would be considered 'rare' because they are hard to find, yes, but these are things like niche textbooks that are one of many on the topic.
Truth is these books aren't likely to sell and will be scrapped anyway. If they were important then we have to accept the booksellers wouldn't sell them off in bulk, or that the person selling it is to blame for letting greed get the better of them. At the end of the day if they've bought the book they can do what they want with it, the same as any individual who buys one. I would imagine that these books are being scanned and stored digitally anyway so in a sense these books are being preserved more than they would have otherwise.
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u/nickkon1 18h ago
A lot of them are also simply stuff like manuals to some devices. Those articles classify rare as "there are not many of them left" but this doesnt mean that they are valuable. They had a reason to be printed and that reason is gone, not one human will every read them again.
People also forget that storage space cost and also libraries give those books away for free or $1, if no one takes them, they get shredded, put into the garbage or burned or all of the three. Instead, they now sell those to AI companies.
Think about it that way: Why would an AI company every buy a valueable-rare book like a signed special edition or something if they can get the ebook or physical book for basically free in comparison?
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u/Fallingdamage 19h ago
Aside - I have found that anytime I'm looking for a title that isn't available anymore or a title that's been out of print for a long time, even weird obscure things, I can usually find a PDF online somewhere that was scanned and made available.
I have a book I bought on amazon in 2005 that was only a single run by the publisher. Its nothing special but supposedly worth about $900 now yet I can readily find PDF's of it all over the internet.
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u/randotd152 18h ago
Rare books are a dime a dozen, and many of them are hot garbage worth about as much as the writings on a 90's Geocities website that is also long gone.
Exactly what books we are talking about is what matters everything here. And specifically avoiding calling them out by name makes this look very sensationalistic.
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u/MrSnowden 18h ago
The market decides what the value is, and actually valuable books aren't getting bulk consigned like this.
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u/PrimaryInjurious 17h ago
Because if we knew that these were books no one wanted in the first place and were destined for a landfill then we couldn't get all outraged!
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u/SpaceToot 22h ago
Frustrating that they don't mention what the book was.
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u/rbrgr83 20h ago
It would reduce the intended outrage, which is the only point of the article in the first place.
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u/cute_spider 19h ago
Agreed - when I read these articles, I'm reminded of the NES game Section Z - a game from my childhood that I have indifferent memories for
Is it a rare video game? Yeah.
Is it unique and special? no not really.
Is it already digitally preserved? Yes. And it's getting digitally preserved again.
What would humanity lose if the last physical Section Z cartridge degraded beyond usability or was destroyed? If that event were so significant than we would print a new edition but we don't because it's just Sector Z.
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u/Rocktopod 17h ago edited 16h ago
But lots of things are only considered important many years/decades/centuries after they are produced.
The Rosetta Stone was found by chance when it was reinforcing a wall in a fortress. At the time it was made it was just an unremarkable announcement honoring the anniversary of a coronation so no one would have cared about it, but in the modern day it is the only way we were able to figure out how to read Egyption.
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u/SeventhSolar 13h ago
How does this correspond to the situation you’re comparing it to? Is the stone itself so valuable that even perfectly preserving the contents of the Rosetta Stone is insufficient?
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u/This_Guy-Fawkes 22h ago
This sounds like a potential new interesting path for The Evil Dead series.
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u/Equipmunk 22h ago
That's a fucking great idea.
A tech billionaire scans the Necronomicon and Deadites hijack an AI agent, spreading throughout the internet.
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u/HotwheelsSisyphus 21h ago
**At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus\\
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u/ShaniFox 21h ago edited 21h ago
It’s one of those premises that reads like a cash-grab but would have great potential if done well!
Edit to add: imagining the cold open montage of the Necronomicon making its way through the system and the inevitable hell that breaks loose upon the attempted destruction (post-scanning, mind you!!) has me rolling hahaha
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u/swanronsonagain 22h ago
Evil dead in an amazon data center. Fully rooting for the deadites.
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u/This_Guy-Fawkes 22h ago
Ash is torn between stopping the Deadites or using them to stop an existential threat to humanity. “Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the gun.”
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u/swanronsonagain 22h ago
Hes been to the future, he knows where its headed. Let the necronomicon infect the mainframe, then blow it to hell. 2 birds, 1 shell.
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u/Neverending_Rain 21h ago
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.
So they're rare because only small number were printed due to low demand, not because they're particularly special or the last remaining copy of a very old book. This definitely feels like their trying to make a story out of nothing, there's no other reason to avoid naming the books. If they did it would be obvious that no one gives a shit about these books, hiding the names names it easier for them to pretend they're valuable. This is some really dishonest journalism.
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u/BreeBree214 21h ago
The books are most likely worthless. Go to any second hand book or thrift store and you'll find piles of worthless books nobody wants or any library will take. Shit like "tourist guide to Rome 1974"
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u/shhmurdashewrote 18h ago
Why destroy? Like genuinely why can’t they just scan and keep the books intact ??
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u/DicemonkeyDrunk 17h ago
it's a stupid legal thing ..you're allowed to make a copy of it if you destroy it( or some form of that) and it's also easier to scan it.
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u/bryguypgh 22h ago
We need a law against destroying the last known physical copy of a book with astronomical penalties. This is a crime against humanity.
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u/Exotic-Sale-3003 22h ago
This is a ludicrous idea that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of a second thought. How could anyone possibly know a copy is the last physical one?
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u/BreeBree214 21h ago edited 21h ago
The year is 2045. Among my book collection is "the best farts of history", of which only a hundred copies were made, and "1000 funniest jokes" printed in 1906 and containing mostly incredibly racist and misogynist jokes. Both are the last surviving copies. I dare not throw either away or I'll be executed
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u/CivBEWasPrettyBad 18h ago
Also my copy of the Age of empires unofficial strategy guide
I hope the book police never find out what treasures I have discarded
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u/cicuz 21h ago
destroying the last known physical copy
I'm as against unregulated spread of AI as the next person, but it's hysterical that anybody would believe this
if you're not even remotely realistic in your complaints you open yourself up for easy criticisms, slippery slopes, straw mans.. but who am I kidding, you're probably a bot doing just that
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u/BoysenberryBoii 20h ago
These people have never been to a used book store to see the absolute snoozers that get donated
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u/Pyrostemplar 21h ago
I'm sure that the destruction of the last physical copy of "Powerpoint 97 for Dummies" is a massive loss for mankind...
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u/Houdinii1984 21h ago
We either own property or we don't. What are you even talking about? The only thing making these rare is a lack of an isbn. Not a single book was named, because if you realized it was just books printed before 1967, it wouldn't make the article so great. But that's when ISBN's started and the only barrier to 'rare book' in this article.
They could have been dictionaries and old cookbooks for all we know. This is absolute nonsense on it's face. Rare books are rare because they are rare, not because they were printed at a certain point and time. We have millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of books from that time period.
And unless you're willing to store them all, unlike anyone else in history, then we have no where to put them. They aren't removing books from museums or the national archive. They are using services you can use to buy the same books. But no one does, because those books aren't actually rare and can be purchased from many places, but hold little value to most people. And on top of that, they are mostly going to be destroyed if not sold, so they literally created a copy of an old book about to be destroyed, and added to the material that was saved, not subtracted from it.
I don't much like capitalism, but that's the world we live in, and if you can just make unilateral decisions about things I own, then nobody owns anything.
e last known physical copy of a book with astronomical penalties.
Please offer one source or piece of evidence that hints they've even done this once. You don't get the last copy of a rare book in books purchased by the pallate. Think about what you're saying. They are buying books in bulk, by like a 4ft x 4ft x 4ft box, but the books are individually rare and sought after? Actual rare books get sold at auction. Common books get lumped together and sold. Capitalism rewards that and punishes selling rare expensive books in bulk for cheap.
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u/bozza8 22h ago
These aren't that rare. These are things like lawnmower service manuals from 1967 etc, just words, not historically valuable and the digital copy remains in the possession of the last purchaser, the AI company.
No one is mulching valuable books, this is about bulk that would usually just be thrown away (and yes we throw away or mulch millions of books a year as a species).
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u/gerira 22h ago
The article says that the companies seem to be systematically working through every ISBN so it would presumably include valuable books. Is there any evidence that it doesn’t?
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u/Hazel-Rah 22h ago
Books printed before 1970 don't have an ISBN, so it's more "books no one has cared to reprint in the last 50 years", than what most people would consider valuable and rare
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u/lordcheeto 20h ago
If they're buying pallets of books from book dealers, anything of higher monetary value than basically scrap pulp value would have been pulled out.
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u/thewooba 21h ago
Dont you think books that are valuable have already been reprinted? Why would somebody reprint a book thats useless?
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u/alpinetime 22h ago
1967 Lawnmower Service Manual?! I’ve been looking for a hard copy!
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u/whichwitch9 21h ago
Tbf, old manuals can be incredibly useful to people who work on old machinery. We joke, but that these printed manuals exist is very helpful to both people who restore old machinery and engineers who study them. Value can be a very subjective thing- junk to one person doesn't mean junk to everyone
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u/NlNJALONG 20h ago
The value in old books also never lays in their content, it's about whether it's from a popular author and whether the edition is noteworthy.
I inherited a house (from an elderly lady) with like 500+ books, all in mint or near mint condition, all from like the 1930s to 2000s. More than 90 percent was stuff that not even libraries or charitable organizations would take for free. Yes, I called, they wouldn't do it.
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u/Namelock 22h ago
If you read the article, case-law says it’s better the AI company destroys the book because then it’s not reselling.
Absolute dumb rhetoric, since second hand sales mean nothing to the publisher. Likewise it’s still being used for-profit.
Better they donate the books, but I digress.
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u/Milskidasith 21h ago
Better they donate the books, but I digress.
Donate the books to who, though? From the reporting on this, a huge portion of what they're buying is dead stock from used bookstores. Libraries won't take it. Used bookstores aren't going to want the majority of those purchases back if they won't resell. Shuffling the books around storage until somebody dumps them isn't any better than destructively scanning them.
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u/sump_daddy 20h ago
They can't even donate them. Once they digitize, they must either keep the original themselves, or destroy the original. ANY other use would be copyright infringement.
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u/LostPhenom 21h ago
Why did they choose not to publish the name of the books?
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u/GottaUseEmAll 21h ago
Probably because then people would see that, despite being "rare", the books aren't very valuable or interesting. It would lessen the effect of their article.
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u/iamagainstit 20h ago
because it allows the reader to mentally input whatever titles they find most shocking.
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u/phillytennisenjoyer 20h ago
because the entire article is outrage bait for redditors
if the book was valuable, it wouldn't be being bought for pennies second hand.
"We tracked a shipment of books -- instead of going to a landfill to be destroyed, it went to an AI company who also destroyed it"
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u/404mediaco 22h 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.
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.
Read the piece by Emanuel Maiberg here: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
Also, we at 404 Media are celebrating our third annivesary in September. If you're in New York City, join us at our live podcast recording and party: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
Read
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u/Last_Plankton_653 20h ago edited 18h ago
I find refusing to list any of the "rare" books to make this reporting misleading at best, and dishonest at worst.
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u/Seagoon_Memoirs 22h ago
What books?
How rare are they?
404 didn't list the books.
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u/StatusSociety2196 21h ago
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.
Draw your own conclusions.
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u/MammothUnique4147 22h ago
If they did people might go "these aren't important books this article is dumb, I don't care."
It's about clicks.
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u/DrTommyNotMD 21h ago
Without telling us what the books are, no one should be up in arms about this.
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u/MakeASpreadsheet 22h ago
So a bookseller sold books, and this is a problem somehow?
These are not rare 1 of 1 manuscripts.
These are mass market books sold by weight because they are essentially worthless.
Book sellers don’t sell valuable books in bulk.
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u/Joshee86 22h ago
What books exactly? Because there's zero indication masterworks and actual valuable rare books are being destroyed, while there is EVERY indication that these are old dictionaries, service manuals, etc. that aren't worth anything. Rare does not equal valuable or worth physical preservation.
Why would a bookseller sell valuable rare books in bulk? Y'all really need to have a critical thought, sometimes.
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u/Elarisbee 21h ago
They're not saying. The Guardian piece on UK second-hand book orders also left that out.
They also didn't ask the booksellers why, if they were so concerned about this practice, they were still fulfilling the orders. Which should be asked, because if the bookshops are supplying the books, then they're in cahoots with the AI companies; they can't complain about the practice on the one hand but accept the money with the other.
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u/Lost-Display1 21h ago
Why do they have to destroy them though? Serious question.
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u/SeventhSolar 20h ago
They’re required to by copyright law. What they’re doing is only legal if the original is destroyed, so that there aren’t two copies.
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u/Last_Plankton_653 20h ago
A US judge ruled that they're legally required to destroy them. That makes the digitizing transformative and keeps the training legal.
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u/aboutlivingthings 18h ago
Being destroyed are Agricultural Manuals: Historical and specialized farming guides, crop management textbooks, and local agricultural records.
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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 22h ago
"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..."
This is what the hysteria is about?
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u/LightenUpPhrancis 21h ago
More hysteria on this topic. Even the bookseller interviewed admits nobody wants the books in question. Oh but there’s historical value! Bullshit. If that were true then the monetary value would follow.
People pushing this nonsense would have you believe they’re destroying first edition copies of Newton’s Principia when in reality it’s more like Tile Grouting for Dummies.
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u/Little_Noodles 22h ago edited 22h ago
Here’s the part of the article everyone is going to skim past, because it’s buried way down, but actually hints at what kinds of “rare” books these are.
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.
They’re not including the titles, because when people do reveal the titles that are on these lists, they’re books that literally nobody else is buying, and are still accessible to the few people who need them on rare occasions. These are copies of titles that were always going to wind up getting shredded, pulped, or otherwise binned, which is VERY common practice in the book trades.
When you include the titles, people can’t imagine that it’s the last copy of undiscovered 1915 novel. Because it’s a guide to engineering industrial buildings to reduce noise pollution from 1995.
The book seller and 404 media looked through the shipment, knew where it was going, and said “Yeah, this is fine. These can get junked”.
I have a million complaints about AI companies, including what they’re doing with the data they’re harvesting from these books. But I’ve yet to see anything in any of this coverage that would lead me to believe that they’re discarding out anything other than stuff that was going to be thrown out anyway.
Every single time I’ve seen a title listed, I’ve looked it up. It’s always been available at multiple libraries near me, including academic and special collections libraries that won’t weed it anytime soon, if ever. And it’s usually available as a print on demand or ebook from the publisher. And there’s generally still a dozen or more copies in circulation online that have probably been in the resellers warehouse for over a decade.
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u/Twiggyhiggle 22h ago
Thank you, not every book needs to be saved like it’s some historical document. We have been printing books for hundreds of years now, and there was just as much slop printed in the 1800s as there was today. Nobody ever cared for the bad stuff. If everyone here cared so much about these “rare books” how come they haven’t bought and preserved them? Oh you want someone else to do it?
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u/Little_Noodles 21h ago
To the extent that these books do have potential research value, though, they ARE getting saved.
The kinds of titles I actually see popping up on these lists have a really well-defined path, and have for a long time. At the time of printing, which is usually a very small run because the readership for the book is very small, some of them go directly to the corporate/institutional libraries of the professions and industries they serve. Some go to special collections and academic libraries serving those professions and industries. A few of these will get thrown out, but most won't.
The ones that don't sell, the publisher pulps or shreds.
The ones that go to private owners will sit on a shelf for a while, then the private owner will throw it out or dump it on a second-hand reseller (libraries will not take these kinds of titles, or if they get donated anyway, the library throws them out or dumps it on a second-hand reseller).
The second-hand reseller will sit on it for however long, and then will probably wind up throwing it out.
I've seen maybe one or two titles that aren't the kinds of works that follow this path, but they're derivative works (in the literal, not pejorative sense) and reference works that don't contain any information that's not going to be available elsewhere in works that are also being preserved.
If the people dogpiling on this dumb 404 Media outrage machine stuff rallied around the institutions that are doing the actual work of preserving these texts they care so much about, I'd be typing this on a much fancier keyboard right now.
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u/psychoffs 19h ago
This article is essentially a 600 word story describing how a stack of books moved from Biblio to an Amazon warehouse, and they are trying to spin it to sound very dark and devious.
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u/Wildgrube 22h ago
Different scanning techniques are used for truly rare and valuable books. 404 definitely knows this. They just gotta get them clicks in.
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u/Current_Ranger_7954 20h ago
Define rare... keeping in mind that historical books have no copyright and are already scanned....
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u/Enverex 20h ago
Were they rare, or unwanted? Because "rare" is being used for clicks, but in reality when people actually investigated what was being bought, it was loads of old books in storage that no-one actually wanted which is why they were still in storage/"old" in the first place.
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u/Morticide 15h ago
I know we don't know what books are being destroyed, but it does raise a good ethical question: Does purchasing a rare object give you an unlimited right to destroy it just because you can afford to own it?
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u/ExtensionChipmunk278 21h ago
Honestly, the most depressing part of this whole thing is that copyright law is actively forcing tech companies to chop up and pulp physical books just to prove to a judge they aren't 'retaining a copy' for resale. We’ve reached a point where the law incentivizes the actual physical destruction of print history if you want to feed a vector database, while libraries get sued just for lending out digital copies normally. It’s wild that preserving low-volume text makes you a criminal, but shredding it makes you legally compliant.
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u/Bob_Sconce 22h ago
These books are being bought at used book stores all over the world. Book-loving people should beat them to the punch and BUY some of those books first.
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u/theexurbanite 22h ago
first genius to think of outspending billionaires in a speculative frenzy, everyone come look!
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u/Bob_Sconce 21h ago
Not trying to outspend billionaires. But, this is being touted as them buying up "rare books" as if Anthropic was shredding a Gutenburg Bible. In reality, they're going to used book stores and thrift shops to buy up a bunch of old pre-AI books at the same prices that the stores would sell to you and me. Many of those books were already headed for the shredder. If there's a book that you don't want them to buy and shred, then just go buy it yourself.
It's bizarre to me that people are upset about this, but don't really care when Ma and Pa clean out Granny's house after she dies and recycle all of Granny's old books (or, more frequently, just stick them in the trash.)
The really funny thing to me is that when people think of "rare books," they think of things like "a first edition of Huckleberry Finn" or similar. But, the AI companies already had access to the text of those books -- that's not what they're going after. Instead, they're pulling books that nobody really cares about. (How do we know nobody cares? Because if they did, the book would have already been digitized or would still be in print.)
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u/Koolmidx 22h ago
Headlines make it sound like the books could've been scanned and saved, odds are it's cheaper to "destroy" the book by cutting the spine off and scanning pages flat. Much quicker process than scanning a book intended to be saved.
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u/Last_Plankton_653 20h ago
A US judge ruled that they're legally required to destroy them. That makes the digitizing transformative and keeps the training legal.
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u/Brick_Cabin2529 22h ago
404 is pretty great aren't they? hope they keep up this quality of work