I guess this is the place to discuss the enshittification of Amazon. Someone took a look at the “Best Sellers in Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart” and says they only found 19 books by authors, the rest are AI generated.
They also make this claim about bots reading them, which I hadn’t heard:
This is where the click farms come in. They point bots at the book to read it in Kindle Unlimited… payout is $0.004 per page read, meaning a 400 page book pays $1.60. Several thousand bots vs. several thousand books = $$$$$ pretty fast.
That’s how these are ranking so high.
At this point it’s hard for me to tell if Amazon or Google’s search is shittier. I ordered something earlier this month from Amazon and noticed it was the first thing I’d ordered from them all year. I really should cancel Prime right now, it’s amazing how I’ve just accepted that cost like a consumer dolt. I do like The Boys though.
can’t lie, that’s pretty awesome thinking. have AI spew out 400 pages of nonsense, have 1,000 bots read it once each.
a good scheme like this is fun. yes, i know the actual kindle ebook writers lose out part of the pie, i just respect the ingenuity.
might be interesting how amazon combats it, doesn’t seem like it’ll get any easier. if you pay $10/month for a subscription and then have your bot read $100 worth of books (that you submitted and ‘own’), what are they gonna do?
I’m pretty sure we already have enough shitty human-written romance novels to satisfy demand for the rest of time, so freeing those authors to do basically anything else with their productive capacity is a win for society.
