Full stop, no need to specify e-books.
I've moved my purchasing dollars elsewhere at this point with the exception of some very specific categories. Amazon is just too unreliable.
I wrote a book in 2021 -- a historical novel (in French) -- that I published on Amazon and that did reasonably well and was even selected as one of the five "Amazon Storyteller" for France that year (it didn't win though).
I wrote that book with zero AI, and it was very hard work. It was also not particularly enjoyable, and at times excruciating.
Now I'm writing a second one, also a novel, but using AI tools. AIs don't write the book: I discuss scene beats and plot twists with different models. It's mostly moral support -- something an old-fashioned, experienced editor that had infinite time on their hands might have done.
(Of course I did try to have models do the writing, but the output is usually very poor. I'm surprised that automated ways to detect AI writing don't work, because humans can tell the difference; why can't machines?)
Using AI as a partner/editor transforms the process of writing completely, and makes it actually pleasurable. Now I long for going back to work instead of dreading it.
It's the terrible Amazon shopping experience which puts no value on the customer getting a good product. EBay (!) is much better.
In this post I opined that software engineering is akin to chemical engineering: the goal is a process to churn out software at massive scale much like chemical engineers find ways to produce chemicals by the kilolitre. In the software case this comes at the expense of grace, finesse, and craftsmanship, and I suggested another analogy to being a writer vs. a "literature engineer".
This... is exactly what I meant by "literature engineering".
The advice from the guys making garbage books, which they quite obviously put into practice, is to apply for genres with low book counts to more easily get a best seller badge for that category. Which makes Amazon a war to get miscategorised.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sol...
The kid likes brain teasers, so I'll grab a book here and there. The last one I ordered was seemingly AI generated. The wording was off, the answers were either completely incorrect, or theoretically correct but not matching the question or parameters asked. I can't quite remember the last time I became as infuriated at a...book.
I now only buy books that seem reputable. To a lesser extent, pakt books are also not great. This time they aren't exactly AI generated, but they are very low quality content. So you can't even trust publishers.
But it'd be epic if Bezos got all pissed off about things like these books -- and various other declines of his baby -- so he forced his way back, to smack it into better shape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple
(Why I'd guess there's a nonzero chance of this happening is that, externally, it sounded like Bezos cared strongly about certain ideas, and implemented them forcefully, yet it seems like lately those ideas are being disregarded. If there's any truth to that external impression, then there could be a reckoning. Billions of dollars buys some latitude.)
You know fanfiction sites are great when they train models on the millions of human-written, well-tagged fics
There are more scams than legit products. It used to be the cheapest option, now it's the most expensive. Everyone is just reselling from Ali Express. The quality of the Amazon store went way downhill.
So here is a recent example of modern publishing:
I've been reading things on r/hfy.. which I don't think anyone would argue is high quality literature, but the stories are fun and the premiss of the entire genre works as background structure. One of the better stories is "Nature of Predators" by SpacePaladin15.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/u19xpa/the_nature_of_p...
Ok, so the author wants to publish on Amazon, no big deal these days, here it is:
https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Predators-Book-One/dp/B0CQ5QNW...
(I would argue that the reddit experience is actually better, because there are reader comments after each chapter. Where did the cover art come from? I don't know..)
What about the passive income? Well he's making $6K a month on Patreon. Maybe not passive since he's working on the sequel..
Well, how about an audiobook? Well patreon.com/Adastra650 has made it into an excellent audiobook on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm8OjwhOz-FZG_M_A1u9d...
Some of the voices are AI generated, but they are not bad.. it has me curious what software is used. The thumbnails are also AI.
All significant books require a page on TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheNatureO...
Naturally the story has grown out of HFY, has its own subreddit for fans and fanfiction:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureofPredators/
Naturally there is a NSFW version:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureOfPredatorsNSFW/
The Silo series (or Wool Omnibus) had similar beginnings:
Turns out scammers and spammers can technologically scale their side too, and can even do so in a way that the host profits from so that the host is disincentivized from doing anything about it until it's already gone too far.
Now everything is flooded with noise and supported by ads and meaningful human participation in content approval or customer service is infeasible because we're already on the far side of the transition and they can't match the established scale.
Whoops!
"if you know the norms of publishing, you know it’s unethical"
Good grief.
Should have stopped earlier.
I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.