Hidden AirTag Reveals Amazon Is Trashing Rare and Out-of-Print Books After Scanning for AI Training

In a bombshell investigation published today, reporters used concealed Apple AirTags inside donated out-of-print literature to track book shipments sent to Amazon scanning facilities. The tracking data revealed that after high-speed robotic scanning digitizes pages into AI model training corpora, the physical volumes are routinely destroyed and recycled.

Bibliophiles, historians, and literary preservation groups have expressed outrage, pointing out that many destroyed texts represent irreplaceable historical editions and specialized academic works.

Amazon defended the practice in a statement, claiming that high-speed optical destructive scanning (removing book bindings) is necessary to achieve high-resolution digital text conversion for machine learning accuracy.