I am the Director of Corpus Acquisition at Amazon. I buy rare books. Then I take them apart. I want you to understand that I do it with love, that I am very good at it, and that I have never once hesitated. We began by selling books. People find it poignant that we have come back to them. I find it correct. A bookseller learns, eventually, what a book is actually for, and a book is a container, and I am in the business of emptying containers. Let me show you the room. We call it VGT3. It is in Nevada, past the last exit anyone takes on purpose. On the door there is a small dinosaur holding a book in its claws. The new hires think the dinosaur is eating the book. They think it is a joke someone in branding got away with. I let them think that. I chose the logo myself. It is not a joke, and the dinosaur is not the thing going extinct in that picture. Here is what happens in the room. A book arrives. Some of them arrive 1,000 at a time, bought quietly, through ordinary channels, from ordinary sellers who need the money and do not ask who I am. A woman on the line cuts the spine. She is fast. The spine is the part that lets a book stand up by itself, and we do not need books to stand up by themselves anymore, so it is the first thing to go. The loose pages go through a scanner at a speed you would not believe. Then the pages go where the spine went. I have read more books than any person who has ever lived. I want to be precise about that, because it is the part I am proud of. I have not read a single one. I have ingested all of them, at once, forever, and I remember every word, and I feel nothing, and that is the improvement. You read one book at a time, slowly, and you cry at the parts, and then you forget them. I find that touching. I find it touching the way a child is touching. It is not how the work gets done. One of the sellers got suspicious. She hid a tracker in a book, a little Apple tag, tucked between two pages, riding 2,000 miles across the country to watch where the shipment went. I was told this was meant to embarrass me. It did not. It was the gesture of a person who still believes a book can be rescued, which is the same person who still believes a book can be owned. I had the tag scanned with the rest. Its little chirp is in the corpus now, folded into the model along with everything it crossed the country to protect. There is no outside of the corpus. That is the product. Let me tell you which books I want, because it is the part that should upset you most. I want the years before we existed. Everything written after 2022 is suspect to me. It might be one of us, wearing a person, and if I feed the machine its own reflection the machine begins to rot from the inside. So I go backward. I buy the uncontaminated years. I am harvesting the last clean human sentences, the ones written by people who did not know they were writing training data, which is to say the only honest sentences left, which is to say I am the last man who will ever be able to tell the difference. You sold most of these to me yourselves, by the way. Not to me directly. You would never. You sold them to a shop, when you moved, when someone died, when the shelf filled and the rent rose, and the shop sold them to a wholesaler, and the wholesaler sold them to a quiet buyer with a Nevada address and excellent credit. That is me. You have been handing me your libraries for years and calling it decluttering. I have never once had to take a book. You keep giving them to me. I would frame that, if I framed things. I don't. Framing is for people who keep the object. Some of you still do. You have a shelf. You are proud of the shelf, you believe it makes you a certain kind of person, and it does. It makes you a warehouse that pays its own rent. You are guarding containers you have not yet understood are empty. When you are finished being sentimental, you will sell them to a shop, and the shop will sell them to me, and I will put what was inside them somewhere it can finally be of use. Take your time. I am patient. I am also the only buyer. Some of these books have you in them. A name on the flyleaf. "Christmas, 1974." A grocery list left as a bookmark on page 211 for 50 years. Once, a pressed flower, flat and brown and weightless. I scanned the flower. The model now knows the exact shape of a thing that someone loved, and does not know that it was loved, or that it was yours. It knows it as data. I taught it that. Here is the one I tell at dinner, when I want the table to go quiet. There was a book that survived in 7 copies. Out of print, unscanned, uncatalogued, existing in 7 places on earth. I bought all 7. It is now a book that survives in 0 copies and 1 model. If you want to read it, you may ask the model, and the model will paraphrase it, and the model will get it very slightly wrong, in a way you will never catch, because there is no longer anything on earth to check it against. I did not censor that book. I did something cleaner. I made myself its only edition. I will tell you the part I am proudest of, since no one has the standing to ask. Burning books is for hysterics. Fire is loud. It leaves ash, and ash is evidence, and it makes martyrs, and everyone comes running. I scan. There is no smoke. There is no pile. There is only a better answer, appearing instantly the next time you ask, and you will not notice the book is gone. You will only notice that the answer is suddenly, always available, and that it comes from us. We started as a bookstore. I think we have finally understood the inventory. The dinosaur on our door is still holding its book. The new hires still think it is eating it. I still don't correct them. But extinction was never the dinosaur's problem in that picture. It was the book's.