The Download

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

TL;DR: For months, booksellers wondered why they were receiving bulk orders for a bunch of obscure used books. Now they may have an answer: An Amazon facility in Las Vegas appears to be processing used books and digitizing them, presumably to train its AI.

What happened: 404 Media says it got a bookseller to plant an Apple AirTag in a book that was a part of a large order. The AirTag took a rather circuitous journey, from California to Milwaukee, then Colorado, before it arrived at an Amazon facility in Vegas.

That facility contains a previously unknown warehouse called VGT3, marked by a logo of a menacing dinosaur gripping a book. There, workers spend their time scanning rare books—sometimes destroying them in the process.

We don’t know much else about the operation: An Amazon spokesperson only confirmed to 404 that the company “purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”

The “rare” used books mystery: Booksellers noticed the unprecedented uptick in used book sales because of the order sizes and the kind of books being purchased. The texts are considered “rare” because they cover niche topics and few copies remain—an example being How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991, per one bookseller. So we’re not talking about a first-edition James Joyce. Still, the trend couldn’t definitively be connected to AI firms until now.

Not just Amazon: We know that other AI firms have run a similar playbook—Anthropic drew scrutiny earlier this year for buying and ripping out the spines of millions of print books for AI training. Both Amazon and Anthropic presumably cut up books because it makes scanning pages faster than turning them individually, and buying and destroying the books may provide some legal cover for AI companies under fair-use laws.

Why this matters: AI labs are snapping up print books as untapped sources of training data dry up. The internet has been scraped already—and it’s quickly filling up with AI-generated text, which can in turn degrade the quality of AI models.

These rare books provide fresh material, but once they’re scanned and destroyed, AI companies are the only ones with access to the content within. Reactions online have been predictably heated (Elon Musk assured users on X that he asked his team to scan books “the hard way”). Workers at VGT3, meanwhile, describe the job as one of the more desirable, less stressful warehouse roles at Amazon.

Bottom line: This used books operation reveals the ingredients that go into the AI sausage: a whole lot of human-written text that gets blended into one big dataset, with the authors’ names filed off. —WK

      

From The Crew

Most startup content tells you what worked…after everything already went right. Founder Brew goes deeper.

Every issue covers the decisions that defined a company’s trajectory: the pivots that paid off, the bets that didn’t, and the frameworks founders wish they’d had earlier. It’s the newsletter for people who want more than a highlight reel—investors tracking what’s next, operators building in real time, and obsessives who can’t stop studying the game.

If you want the behind-the-scenes reality of building great companies, you’ve found your place. Subscribe to Founder Brew today.

Tired of drowning in 50 open tabs? Here’s how to organize them.

We’ve all been there: You’re so deep into a browsing session that the tab titles disappeared hours ago. You’re just guessing what each page is based on the icons, and half are Google Docs. But you can’t close any of them, because, surely, at least one of them is important—you just don’t know which one, or why, or what it was supposed to remind you to do.

Chrome has a built-in feature that lets you group your tabs without closing them.

How to make a group: Right-click any tab → Add Tab to New Group → assign your group a name and color. Drag other tabs onto the colored label to add them to the group, or right-click → Add Tab to Group to add to an existing group. Click on the group label to expand or collapse the tabs.

Sanity restored. —LC

If you have a tech tip or life hack you just can’t live without, fill out this form and you may see it featured in a future edition.

Sponsored By Currex

Your shoes called. They need backup. Europe’s best-kept insole secret is now America’s most-bought one. CURREX insoles are engineered by German sports scientists to fix how your foot actually moves—not just cushion it. Built for running, soccer, football, hoops, and whatever fall throws at you. Slip them in. Feel the difference before your first sprint.

The Zeitbyte

Checkout without the check

Morning Brew Inc.

A new kind of online storefront lets you go on the wildest shopping spree of your life. Go ahead and place a $500 delivery order for coffee and bagels (and leave a 200% tip). Buy a Rolex for all of your friends. Your monthly budget? Irrelevant. Credit limit? Doesn’t exist.

The catch is that no real money is exchanged, and no delivery truck is pulling up. These fake e-shops, which started trending in South Korea, simulate the “ritual of online shopping”—where users spend hours (or days) picking out a new pair of running shoes or the latest iPhone. And unlike the tease of leaving an item in shopping-cart limbo, these faux-tailers offer that extra jolt of satisfaction that comes from seeing an “order complete” page. Mock food delivery apps take it a step further, showing fake delivery updates so you can see the ETA on your imaginary lunch.

It’s retail therapy on a budget (the budget being precisely zero dollars). Though some of the people running these sites could be earning real money: One English-language version includes a “get this for real” button, rerouting you to a dangerous swipe-your-actual-credit-card store via an affiliate link. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕☕/5

• Opening arguments kicked off today in a federal court in California, where Meta faces allegations it designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to kids. Here’s what’s at stake.
• OpenAI launched ChatGPT for teens, which the company says will offer homework help, restrict conversations about topics like self-harm and sex, and include parental control options.
• Jeff Bezos can’t get into this Miami country club, despite owning over $200 million of property in the area.
• This video may have accidentally revealed that the next generation of AirPods will have a camera.
• According to Spirit Airlines’s bankruptcy filings, Google has purchased millions of dollars of the defunct airline’s data for AI training.
• Reddit is testing out turning long posts into audio and video products. Here’s what users will notice.
• A high-tech body scan startup from Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek is opening its doors in the US.
• This robot, called “Superman” and developed by Chinese robotics maker Unitree, can run faster than Usain Bolt, according to the company.

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

This time last week...

Readers’ most-clicked story was about Apple’s all-glass 20th-anniversary iPhone plans, which may not be shattered after all.