How an AirTag planted by a reporter led to a secret Amazon site where old books are cut apart and scanned

Amazon is reportedly cutting the spines off old books and scanning the pages at a Las Vegas facility, presumably to train AI models on text that exists almost nowhere else. The company won’t confirm that’s the reason. It gave us the same statement it provided to 404 Media, which broke the story : it “purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.” But what really got my attention (and professional admiration) was 404 Media’s means of discovering this was happening at all: reporter Emanuel Maiberg put an Apple AirTag in a rare book and watched where it went, like a biologist tracking an endangered salmon.

Maiberg, a co-founder of 404 Media, has been digging into this topic for a while. He reported in July that booksellers were seeing a massive surge in bulk orders from buyers who didn’t haggle. According to Maiberg’s latest story, a seller informed him that they’d received an order for about 1,000 books through the marketplace Biblio, and agreed to slip an AirTag supplied by 404 Media into one of them. 404 Media granted the seller anonymity because the seller was worried the disclosure would hurt their business.

The book flew out of a California airport to Milwaukee, sat for two weeks in a distribution warehouse outside Kenosha, Wis., then went west by truck, making an overnight stop in Grand Junction, Colo., before arriving at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas known as LAS8. As Maiberg recounts in the story, he was initially confused. LAS8 is largely a print-on-demand operation. It prints and ships books as customers order them, the opposite of destroying them. But the AirTag put the book at the north end of the building, which Amazon employees who posted on a workers’ forum described as a separate operation with its own code: VGT3. Its logo, painted at the entrance, is a T. rex with an open book in its hands. Employees described a split operation: some workers cut books, others received them and scanned bar codes. Booksellers told Maiberg the bulk orders never included the very rarest books, the ones old enough to predate ISBNs, suggesting that buyers were working methodically through the serial numbers assigned to every published book.

This technique of journalistic investigation has actually been around for a while. The Basel Action Network , a Seattle nonprofit, started planting GPS trackers inside old printers and monitors in 2014, dropping them at Goodwill locations and recyclers around the country to find out where America’s electronic waste actually ends up. Nearly a third of the tracked devices were exported. Two old TVs dropped at Oregon recyclers traveled to a warehouse in south Seattle, then to the Port of Seattle, and to junkyards in Hong Kong. BAN’s trackers led to federal conspiracy charges against Total Reclaim, the Seattle recycler that had been handling that Oregon e-waste. Over the years, others have adopted the same tactics. ABC News put trackers in plastic bags dropped at Walmart and Target recycling bins in 10 states, and Finland’s public broadcaster hid them in used clothing to trace where donated fast fashion actually ends up. What’s different now is the hardware. BAN worked with MIT and used cellular trackers that needed a data plan. Maiberg used a $29 AirTag that reports its position by pinging any nearby iPhone.

What’s going on at VGT3? Sure, it’s possible that the slicing and scanning at Amazon’s VGT3 could be for something other than training AI models. Amazon has digitized books for two decades, for example, going back to Search Inside the Book. But that program runs on files publishers submit themselves. It doesn’t require buying used copies on the open market and cutting the spines off. The circumstantial evidence pointing to ...