It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. 

A
404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying
operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking
device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company
for training data, and following it around the country to its final
destination. 

That
final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon
employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive
shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order
to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the
process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse,
called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its
hands.

…

We’re not
revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked,
but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in
circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever
printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many
people speak. As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not
many people in the world who would care about them in the same way
people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable. 

“There
are different types of value,” the bookseller said. “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.”

Just to be clear, the
destructive method is faster and cheaper but given the tremendous
resources of Amazon and the spectacular amount of money that has been
spent and in many cases demonstrably wasted pumping up the AI bubble,
that’s not much of an excuse. Arguably even worse when you remember this is all going to train the latest of Amazon’s crappy Nova series. 

This
was a choice they made, just like setting up massive fossil fuel power
plants now rather than taking the time to increase nuclear and renewable
capacity was a choice, just like stealing the intellectual property of
countless writers and artists was a choice, just like rolling out
products that weren’t ready for prime time was a choice, just like
setting up ridiculously at complex and deceptive financing schemes
rather than growing the industry in a sustainable way was a choice.