Amazon destroys rare books after using them to train its AI

Amazon uses rare books to train its AI and destroys the originals

What does Amazon do with the books that no one else has inventoried? According to a journalistic investigation, it buys them by the pound, feeds them to its artificial intelligence and sends them to the shredder. This is not an accidental fire like the one at the Library of Alexandria: this is premeditated, with a roadmap and, probably, an expense report.

The logic behind it is not that of a whimsical bibliophile. By buying copies that barely exist on the market, Amazon eliminates the physical copy and leaves the knowledge only on its servers. Anyone who wants to consult it will have to pay the toll. "Control of the textual corpus is control of the knowledge market," as the circulating analysis puts it: power, in the hands of a monopoly, always ends up converted into rent.

Others see something more unsettling than money. Somewhere between 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, the move seems designed to rewrite the past: once the only accessible copy is destroyed, the version of events is left at the mercy of the corporate narrative. But they don't need all the books, just the source that can no longer be consulted.

The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Control is the long-term profit. And culture, meanwhile, becomes a commodity that disappears so that access to it keeps costing money. As someone with more irony than patience once said: first they let you photocopy for free, then they charge you for the cloud, and when there's no paper left, you realize it was never really yours.