Not really. It's not to my taste, but I've found their journalism to generally be lefty but focused on important events.

Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

The difference is huge between 404 and Fox. Fox is out here trying to tell people there's a trans agenda, and that Biden was a lunatic leftist. They are just making up stories and publishing them because they know their audience engages. 404 definitely make editorial choices about which stories to pursue but I've largely found them to be grounded in real depictions of stuff that is happening.

Something can be "rare" while also having no value. One only needs to take a look at their local Facebook Marketplace listings to see this in action.

Rare invokes images of limited edition runs of well loved books, when in reality it's probably extremely outdated software guides, how-tos, technical manuals, etc.

Again, what rare books? Like they pointed to a book with low published volume or foreign language is “rare”. If you have ever been to annual library book sales you start to realize just how many books get thrown out. I can go buy a stack of books from the 1880s and 1890s on eBay right now for $25. $4 each. Most people don’t realize how worthless books are, even “rare” ones.

I even imagine that the market price for these “rare” books is helping filter out anything truly valuable and rare. It just reads as a rage bait tmz article. The quantity of used books including “rare” books that get thrown into the dump is astronomical.

> Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

No, destroying collectible books would be a shame, not just any rare worthless books. But these are not collectible. The article tried to dance around it by saying maybe some books have a sentimental value to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean any library or collector wants it. Don’t fall for manufactured outrage!

Edit: Here’s an example of an extremely rare book. My great great grandfather published a book of sermons around 1920. That book has zero value to anyone other than my dad. Would I be outraged if it ended up at someone’s estate sale, then a used bookstore, and then an LLM consumed it to learn to read? No; I would have expected it to have been discarded by humans before the LLM even got to it. Most of what we leave behind is discarded.

You don't know the books are being destroyed. There are automated scanners with page turners.