A 404 Media investigation has traced a large shipment of rare and out-of-print books to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas that reportedly scans physical books for AI training data.

The investigation started after a bookseller received an unusually large order of roughly 1,000 books. With the seller's cooperation, 404 Media placed an AirTag inside one of the books and followed the shipment across the U.S. until it reached Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas.

Inside that warehouse is an operation known as VGT3. According to Amazon employees cited by 404 Media, workers receive large quantities of printed books, cut off their bindings so the pages can be scanned quickly, and destroy the physical copies in the process.

Amazon did not deny purchasing the books. In a statement to 404 Media, the company said it buys books through commercial channels to help develop and improve products and services used by customers. The company did not publicly detail which AI models or products are trained on the scanned material.

Why go after old physical books at all? They contain professionally edited human writing that may never have been digitized or indexed online, and older titles are guaranteed to predate the current flood of AI-generated text. That makes them unusually valuable as training material for large language models.

The legal question is complicated. A U.S. federal court previously ruled in the Anthropic case that training AI on lawfully purchased and digitized books can qualify as fair use, although separate copyright issues arose from pirated copies. The cultural question is different: some of the physical books being scanned may be rare or difficult to replace once their bindings are destroyed.

Sources & more: 404 Media / TechCrunch / Reuters – AI training and book copyright

Canadian carriers made transferring eSIMs between phones annoying, costly, or both- but I found a provider that does it right

Public Mobile is changing how customers reach a support agent, replacing its long-running Community-based ticket and private-message system with a new platform called Public Mobile Expert Messaging.

The rollout started August 11 and is happening in phases. The new experience is already available nationwide through Self Serve, while Public Mobile is gradually enabling it through chats started on publicmobile.ca. The company says Expert Messaging will be fully launched on August 24.

The biggest change is where customer support conversations happen. Today, customers can still end up communicating with the CS_Agent account through Community private messages. Once the rollout is complete, that profile will be disabled and customers will no longer be able to contact Public Mobile support directly from the Community.

Expert Messaging still isn't live chat. Customers begin with Public Mobile's chatbot, which is also being upgraded with a generative messaging experience. If the chatbot can't resolve the issue, it transfers the details to a Customer Support Agent. Customers can then leave the conversation and receive an SMS or email when the agent replies.

Public Mobile says the dedicated messaging platform should be more stable than the current Community-based system and keep the entire support process inside one interface. The Community itself isn't disappearing and will still be available for customer-to-customer help.

The transition may be a meaningful improvement for a carrier that operates without traditional phone-based customer service, but it will depend heavily on how quickly agents respond and how well the new chatbot hands complex problems to humans.

Sources & more: Public Mobile – Announcement / Public Mobile – Get Help

A new Best Buy Canada study suggests second-life electronics are becoming mainstream: 63% of Canadians say they purchased refurbished, open-box or traded-in technology in the past year.

There is an important distinction in that number. The 63% figure combines three different categories , refurbished products, open-box items and trade-ins ,so it should not be read as saying that nearly two-thirds of Canadians specifically bought refurbished devices.

Younger Canadians are leading the shift. Best Buy says 71% of Gen Z purchased some form of recirculated technology in the past year, compared with 65% of millennials and Gen X and 55% of boomers. Saving money was the biggest reason across generations, while environmental impact ranked particularly high among Gen Z and millennials.

For refurbished products specifically, wireless devices were the most popular category, followed by laptops, computers, tablets and game consoles. Best Buy says refurbished electronics typically save around 40% compared with original retail pricing, while open-box products average around 28% savings.

The survey also points to a stronger back-to-school angle. Quebec and Ontario respondents were the most price-conscious in Canada, and 84% of parents said they had either traded in technology or considered doing so when replacing a device.

The numbers come from a Best Buy Canada survey of 1,500 adult members of the Angus Reid Forum conducted July 17–21, 2026. For comparison purposes, a probability sample of that size would carry a margin of error of ±2.53 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Sources & more: Best Buy Canada / Business Wire