Welp..this is a problem we have to expect now. What a time to be alive. The scary part is this is basically gen 1. Wait till the books are actually good
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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What I don't understand is who is downloading and reading these books?
My guess is: adventurous readers who are intrigued by a small snippet, then figure it out on page 2 after they've bought it already.
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Behind the Bastards just did a two-parter on this phenomenon but with children’s “books.” Icky stuff. Great episodes, but ugh that this is even a thing.
Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617646703
Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617949358
Remember the good old days when you could mod your kindle and download any book from Amazon servers? Lots of books got leaked that way.
I recently released a book using Kindle Unlimited Publishing and was surprised at how easy and simple the whole process was. Especially the Kindle only bits since the formatting and dimensions of the cover don't really matter for digital versions.
It was quite the learning process to get the physical books right but that's a different story and one that bots would probably care much less about since the margins are so low.
However, even outside of nonsense written by AI, there were already a ton of questionably written titles that were trying to take advantage of SEO and keywords. This feels like an easy next step for the people who never cared about writing interesting stories and just saw a system they could exploit.