Hidden AirTag Investigation Reveals Amazon Shredding Rare Out-of-Print Books Post AI Digitization
A sensational investigative report published by Ars Technica has revealed that Amazon is systematically recycling and shredding rare, out-of-print books post-digitization. Investigators concealed Apple AirTags inside several hard-to-find 19th-century volumes sold to Amazon procurement vendors, tracing their journey to industrial paper destruction facilities.
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Document archives indicate Amazon acquired thousands of rare historical texts to train its next-generation LLM reasoning models on specialized domain knowledge not available on the public open web. To accelerate scanning throughput, books were un-bound, high-speed scanned, and discarded.
Archivists and literary historians have voiced outrage, calling for immediate federal regulations to protect physical literary heritage from destruction by tech monopolies.