Amazon has been buying rare books, removing their spines and scanning them for AI training, according to a report by 404 Media that tracked one such book to the company's VGT3 facility in Las Vegas. Amazon said it "purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use." The report points to a growing scramble for high-quality text as large language models (LLMs, AI systems trained on massive datasets) exhaust easily available internet material. Rare and out-of-print books can provide hard-to-find text that is less likely to contain AI-generated material, which developers may want to avoid because repeated training on synthetic content can contribute to model collapse (declining output quality after recursive AI training).