Emanuel Maiberg put an AirTag in a rare book and followed it to Amazon’s LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas. The tracker led him to the north end of the building, where employees described a separate operation that cuts books and scans bar codes. Amazon says it buys books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.
Maiberg’s $29 AirTag
Maiberg, a 404 Media reporter and co-founder, used a $29 Apple AirTag that reports its position by pinging any nearby iPhone. A seller agreed to slip it into one of about 1,000 books ordered through Biblio. The choice of a cheap tracker made the route visible without needing access to Amazon’s systems.
California to Las Vegas
The book flew out of a California airport to Milwaukee. It then sat for two weeks in a distribution warehouse outside Kenosha, Wis. After that, it went west by truck and made an overnight stop in Grand Junction, Colo., before reaching LAS8. That path shows how bulk book orders can move through multiple handoffs before they reach a warehouse floor.
LAS8’s VGT3 operation
The AirTag placed the book at the north end of LAS8. Amazon employees who posted on a workers’ forum described that area as a separate operation with its own code, VGT3. They described some workers cutting books and others receiving them and scanning bar codes.
Booksellers told Maiberg that the bulk orders never included the very rarest books, the ones old enough to predate ISBNs. That detail narrows the target to older titles that still carry standard identifiers. It also suggests the orders were methodical, not random.
Amazon did not say the books are being used to train AI models. The company’s statement leaves the purpose of the scanning work open, even as the reporting places the physical handling inside a major Amazon site. The unresolved question is what exact purpose the scanned old books serve at LAS8.
