Behind the Blog: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Flamin' Hot Slop

404 Media's Behind the Blog discusses the destruction of rare books by Amazon to train AI, referencing a podcast episode and a Substack post by Sam. The post is paywalled for members.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss cool old books, new toys for ICE, and Flamin' Hot Slop. SAM: On the podcast last week https://www.404media.co/podcast-amazon-is-destroying-rare-books-to-train-ai/ , we had what I thought was a pretty nuanced and interesting conversation about the "rare books" discourse although I'm biased; listen and let me know . I mentioned this in the episode but it all makes me think about all the rare books I've bought over the years — these are rare by any definition of the word in that they're usually limited or out of print and I got them through used book sellers online where only one copy was often available. When my book launched a few years ago, I started a very short-lived Substack blog https://comingonline.substack.com/p/reaping-sowing-books-edition to write about some of the behind the scenes stuff happening around publication. One of those posts https://comingonline.substack.com/p/reaping-sowing-books-edition is a bibliography, including a lot of the books I sourced and references for my own. This post is for paid members only Subscribe /membership/ Sign up for free access to this post Subscribe /signup/ Sign in /signin/