Amazon buys rare books, cuts off the bindings, and scans them for AI training

A 404 Media investigation tracked a shipment of rare books to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where a team called VGT3 strips the bindings to scan faster and destroys the physical volumes, feeding the scans into AI training. The bookseller who sold them notes the historical and intellectual value discarded when a book is treated as words on a page, and the contrast is stark against the Internet Archive, which digitizes one page at a time without destroying a binding and has been sued for it.

Source: observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com ↗