Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books? It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there. What do you think about Amazon doing this? At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

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Russian attacks on Ukrainian publishing infrastructure in July and August destroyed roughly 10 million books, which equates to about 30% of Ukraine's annual book output. The Ukrainian Book Institute is warning of a potential "collapse of the entire book ecosystem" and is calling for international financial and industry support to help publishers, printers, and distributors recover. The Guardian reports: A major attack on August 1 hit warehouses belonging to the RNK-Ranok publishing group in Kharkiv, destroying approximately 8m books, following July attacks in Kyiv which led to the loss of more than 1.5m books. In all, the recent attacks have led to the destruction of approximately 30% of the volume of books produced annually in Ukraine. The RNK-Ranok logistics centre, which stores books for the company's many imprints, is also the distribution centre for the national bookselling chain KnyhoLand, which runs 51 shops and several websites. Along with the estimated 8m books lost, a further 600,000 school textbooks were destroyed. The total loss has been preliminarily estimated at almost 1bn hryvnias (16.5m eueros). "At this stage, we face the risk of the collapse of the entire book ecosystem," said Oleksandra Koval, director of the Ukrainian Book Institute. The institute is asking for donations to support Ukrainian publishers, and is calling on the international publishing community to work with Ukrainian publishers and raise awareness about Russian attacks on Ukrainian culture. On August 16, a Russian attack on Kyiv led to a fire breaking out at the Pochaina book market, destroying several rows of stalls, books and vendors' property. The Pochaina market, founded in 1997, was once one of Ukraine's largest book markets, with hundreds of stalls and books from more than 120 publishers. The institute said the book industry was of "strategic importance" to Ukraine, preserving and promoting Ukrainian culture and giving the country's voice a platform at home and abroad. [...] The institute also called for an end to cooperation with Russian publishers and literary agencies, saying that solidarity with Ukrainian publishers was crucial to preserving cultural heritage that Russia was "deliberately trying to destroy."

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