Amazon Bought Rare Books. A Tracker Led to Its Las Vegas Scanning Site.

Amazon says it purchases books through commercial channels to develop and improve its products and services. But a rare-book shipment tracked by 404 Media ended at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where employees posting online describe an operation that cuts bindings and scans books, destroying the physical copies.

The tracker was placed in a rare book that a bookseller included in a large order on the Biblio marketplace. That method mattered because marketplace sellers ship books to intermediary warehouses while the ultimate buyer remains anonymous to them. The shipment ultimately arrived at LAS8, an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.

Inside LAS8’s north-end operation

LAS8 appears to include a print-on-demand operation, but 404 Media identified a distinct operation at its north end called VGT3, marked by a Tyrannosaurus rex holding a book. Employees posting online described VGT3 as a place where workers receive books, scan barcodes and content, and, in some roles, cut books before scanning them.

Cutting a spine makes page scanning cheaper and faster, according to the investigation, but destroys the printed volume. That is especially consequential for this shipment: the bookseller said the titles were rare, with relatively few copies in circulation.

Employee posts also described scanning book barcodes or ISBNs before scanning their contents. That pattern aligns with booksellers’ theory that buyers may be working methodically through ISBN lists, but it does not establish that Amazon is pursuing such a program.

A purchase confirmation, not a full explanation

Amazon’s public response confirms the purchases but does not describe the Las Vegas workflow. “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” a spokesperson told 404 Media. Amazon did not answer the publication’s questions about why books were cut, how many comparable facilities it operates, or its response to criticism over book destruction.

The practice has a recent legal precedent. An authors’ lawsuit against Anthropic disclosed Project Panama, a program that acquired books through marketplaces, removed their spines and scanned them. A judge in that case found scanning for training data could qualify as fair use in part because the original printed copies were destroyed rather than duplicated for resale.

One documented destination in a larger buying surge

Booksellers had already reported a rise in large, seemingly random and price-insensitive orders, leading them to suspect AI companies were buying books in bulk. That remains a suspicion rather than an explanation for every order. The tracking experiment instead documents one path from a rare-book sale to Amazon’s Las Vegas site, alongside employee accounts of a destructive scanning workflow.