When Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, he wanted it to become the world’s largest bookstore.
Now the company is reportedly buying books, slicing off their spines and scanning the pages for artificial intelligence training data before destroying the originals.
Amazon, which operates 19 facilities in Southern Nevada, scans and shreds books at its LAS8 warehouse in North Las Vegas, according to a 404 Media investigation that tracked an order of about 1,000 books to the facility.
A bookseller on Biblio — an online marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books — allowed 404 Media to place an Apple AirTag into one volume in the shipment that the seller suspected was headed for AI training.
The final signal came from the north end of the LAS8 Amazon Fulfillment Center, located at 5801 N. Nicco Way. While the facility features a print-on-demand operation, a special unit located on the north end of the warehouse called VGT3 scans and shreds books for AI training, according to 404 Media.
The logo painted on the unit’s entrance is a Tyrannosaurus rex holding an open book and baring its teeth, appearing ready to eat it.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But a company spokesperson told 404 Media and Inc. that “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
Inc. found signs that unusual book shipments were reaching the same North Las Vegas warehouse nearly two years ago. In a September 2024 discussion on Amazon’s seller forums, booksellers reported sudden bursts of orders destined for LAS8. One seller said he received 68 orders from a single buyer. Another said the same account bought books from him “every day.”
According to 404 Media, VGT3 employees scan each book’s ISBN barcode before scanning its pages. The International Standard Book Number, which has been around since 1970, is a unique 13-digit (or older 10-digit) code used globally to identify a specific book. The record of ISBNs tells AI companies which books they still need to complete the entire ISBN database.
Booksellers across the U.S. and Europe have reported bulk orders with no coherent subject matter, unified only by having ISBNs, placed by buyers with no interest in literary or commercial value, according to TechTimes.
“There are different types of value,” the unidentified Biblio bookseller told 404 Media. “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. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”
Fair use
Amazon isn’t the first company to reportedly purchase massive amounts of books for AI data. Court documents revealed that Anthropic bought millions of books, removed their spines and scanned their pages before destroying them in an initiative called Project Panama.
“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” Anthropic said in an internal document unsealed earlier this year as part of the copyright class action lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic.
In June 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that converting a lawfully purchased physical book into a digital AI training file constituted transformative fair use under copyright law. But because Anthropic settled the case rather than appealing it, there is no binding precedent for other jurisdictions.
While Anthropic legally purchased millions of books to build a digital library used to train its Claude AI models, the company also downloaded more than seven million pirated copies, which led to a $1.5 billion settlement.
Booksellers split on topic
According to The Next Web, Stuart Manley of Barter Books in England told the BBC that he hasn’t seen bulk orders like this in 30 years and that he’s been able to sell books online that haven’t sold for 20 years.
“The world no longer needs five million copies of ‘The Da Vinci Code,’” he said.
But the world does need antiquarian books, said Derek Walker of McNaughtan’s in Scotland, where he recently sold the only known copy of an 18th century edition.
“It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long,” he said.
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on X.
