Amazon, once an online bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI models

TechCrunch · Amanda Silberling · 17 August 2026, 16:38 ● Covered by 7 sources

Amazon is buying rare books, cutting their spines, and scanning them to provide text for AI model training, based on tracking of a book sent to its Las Vegas facility. The report says the shipment arrived at facility VGT3 in Las Vegas. This shifts rare-book handling toward bulk digitization for AI training, rather than preservation or resale.

Why it matters

Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.