It’s bots all the way down at kindle unlimited

The two communities I'm most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my "fun" book recommendations from those subs.

I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I'm not really interested in sitting in a chat room.

So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn't be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I'd be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it's a possibility that even that job isn't safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.

I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing "literary" stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing...

Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.

Powell's always has great recommendations, I've found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.

I think you've misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.

This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can't deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.

They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.

The books aren't 'word salad' so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren't word salad, they just aren't human.

This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.

I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn't feel like a good omen for my children.

What's odd is that this isn't an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what's happening pretty fast.

The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they're doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.

There is no way a modern LLM wrote this stuff. Maybe a medium language model, or a really old LLM. It reads better than a Markov chain's work, I guess.

The kindle eink reader is amazing and absolutely great. However I don’t use KU and rarely buy books on it. I mainly use my library and read the borrowed books on it. As a piece of hardware it’s one of the few Amazon builds well. I’m surprised too.

Don't worry, your utopian vision of streets full of closed shops and associated tumbleweed will be here soon enough.

Flat Earth adherents? What's their dirty secret?

There's even a federated alternative, BookWyrm!

...I guess these days the Fediverse is my hammer of choice, and every problem with the internet is a nail.

Judging by the article even the snippets are pure nonsense:

Black lace pajamas, very short skirt, the most important thing, now this lace pajamas are all wet.

It could be vastly improved upon with the new LLMs, but these are just complete rubbish.