In 1994, Jeff Bezos started Amazon as a small online bookstore. The idea was simple. He used digital logistics to give more people access to books. Three decades later, his company runs a quiet warehouse in Las Vegas. There, industrial machines slice the bindings off rare books. Workers feed the loose pages into scanners and dump the shredded remains into recycling bins.

An investigative report from 404 Media exposed this operation. An antiquarian book dealer grew suspicious of massive bulk orders. The seller hid an Apple AirTag inside a shipment. It tracked the package to an Amazon artificial intelligence facility known as VGT3. Worker interviews confirmed the routine. Tech teams destroy physical books to scan loose pages on fast sheet rollers. It cuts digitization costs to a fraction of normal methods.