We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.
That's enlightening and ghastly. Great article, thank you.
@blobster @404mediaco Just for clarity, ISBNs track each edition of a book; hardbacks and paperbacks will get different ISBNs.
So this is a sorta dumb way to do what they want to do.
(Eg, 0374275637 and 0374533555 are both Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, in hardback and paperback, respectively.) They may also be buying the same book with the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13, 978-0374533557 for the paperback.)
@adamshostack @blobster @404mediaco Their web scraping is also done in "a sorta dumb way", so that checks out.
