4 ms·
Amazon limits authors to 3 books a day to combat AI-generated material
- cratermoon 3y ago3 books a DAY? How about 3 books a month? Or 3 books a year? Only the most prolific authors have managed 3 books a month.
- paulpauper 3y agobecause Amazon allows anything and no quality control. someone can just re-publish Wikipedia articles as books, which a lot of people do.
- koreth1 3y agoWhat would "quality control" look like for self-published books?
- ceejayoz 3y agoPay a few bucks for someone to skim through it?
- envsubst 3y agoA 15 minute human review process that checks if it: - is copy pasted from another source or the internet - respects copyright - is written in the language it says it is In graduate school nobody can understand each other's papers, so the colleges set up a massive list of formatting guidelines. The idea being the focus on formatting means you at least had to spend a minimum amount of effort.
- dragonwriter 3y agoA 15-minute human review is not going to be able to check all three of those things, or really do much of a job on even either of the first two in isolation.
- envsubst 3y agoAutomation + human judgement. It works for iOS.
- balderdash 3y agoThat would impede their money laundering and stolen credit card revenue…
- hotnfresh 3y agoWell. A lot of things suddenly make a lot more sense now.
- Ancalagon 3y agoWhy didn't I realize this before? I'm laughing at myself this makes so much sense now.
- selcuka 3y agoMoney laundering might be a thing, but I can't see how they could benefit from stolen credit cards. They have to refund when the card owner contacts their bank, don't they?
- ronsor 3y agoThat assumes the cardholder actually realizes their card has been stolen. Many people may not notice an extra $50/month being siphoned from them, especially if they already use Amazon.
- Finnucane 3y agoLionel Fanthorpe legendarily wrote a book every weekend, but he is also legendarily one of the worst writers of all time.
- angry_moose 3y agoI could see that for a few reasons. Someone new to Amazon adding their entire library at once, an updated edition of a long running series, different language versions of the same book, etc. Probably not many (any?) legitimate authors writing 3 books a day, but there are lots of instances where an author might be trying to add several at once. Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable to allow these legitimate upload waves though.
- selcuka 3y ago> Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable That would cause scammers to create new accounts, upload 60 books, hope to sell a few on the first few days until they get caught, then rinse and repeat. Amazon will probably also monitor accounts who upload 3 books a day using some heuristic so that they can stop it before it becomes an issue.
- flangola7 3y agoAmazon holds onto funds for at least 30 days. You can't bait and switch that fast.
- selcuka 3y agoFair point. It still pollutes the marketplace, though.
- internetter 3y agoNo one would pollute the marketplace unless expecting profit
- makeitdouble 3y agoThe notion of "book" is way fuzzier that it was in the olden days. There's nothing stopping an author from releasing one or two thousand words every as a single book, inside a larger story (basically having a book for what could have been single chapters ?) Same way illustrators could publish their roughs and croquis as books, etc. As those can be set with a 0$ price, and virtually no inventory issue, it feels like a practice that doesn't penalize either amazon, nor the author, nor the readers.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> There’s nothing stopping an author from releasing one or two thousand words every as a single book, inside a larger story (basically having a book for what could have been single chapters ?) Amazon has a separate service within KDP for exactly that kind of serialization, [0] so while its true that KDP handles a wider range of books than just the novel-size works people seem to be thinking about, that particular example is probably an explicitly not-prioritized use case for regular “book” publishing on KDP. [0] Kindle Vella: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7
- twobitshifter 3y agoMy friend wrote a children’s book using AI. Even without AI, it may be possible to make a few children’s books with the same characters in a single day. I’m curious though, who are the authors who have published 3 long form books per month?
- bombcar 3y agoDepends on your definition of what a book is. If you step outside of novels you have books that are mainly tables of facts, or get updated monthly, etc.
- __loam 3y agohttps://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-children https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-your-chi... Your friend might be part of the problem.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Only the most prolific authors have managed 3 books a month. KDP “books” include “low-content books” (prompt journals, etc.), not just novels.
- kjs3 3y agoThat's...what's a apropos word...comical?
- geodel 3y agoThis seems to be biased against writers who write books really fast. I feel authors using cloud scale resources can easily write 10 books a day.
- photonbeam 3y agoThe 10x Author is a myth
- ralusek 3y agoStephen King on cocaine in the 80s was very real.
- winrid 3y agofor those wondering, he wrote at least 16 novels in the 80s... several in the same year.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIsaac Asimov was quite real.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 3y agoWalter B. Gibson would disagree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson
- Ajedi32 3y agoBrandon Sanderson must be fuming.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoThis was probably not meant to be a humourous comment but it made me laugh. Something tells me these "authors" will not be winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, inclusion in the Book of the Month club, or any literary honours for that matter.
- Tommstein 3y agoNice of them to decide a human can actually write three books a day. Four, hell naw, can't be done, but three, yep, seems legit.
- pstuart 3y agoSkipping lunch, dinner and making bio breaks really short are key productivity tricks.
- tetete 3y agoDam, I need to make a second Amazon seller account now. My average is 5 books a day.
- MattGaiser 3y agoOver 1000 books a year is considered reasonable by Amazon?
- verdverm 3y agoif you're making a commission on every shovel... I guess so?
- ashton314 3y agoOof Brandon Sanderson is gonna have to slow down or make several pseudonyms.
- pier25 3y agoWho is buying these AI generated books?
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion over here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561668
- IronWolve 3y agoTheres lots of fake 'work books' being uploaded to come up first in search results. Amazon has some major issues with AI books flooding the initial results.
- tzs 3y agoIsaac Asimov averaged an original book about every 6 weeks over the time between his first book was published and his death. He also averaged editing a new anthology or collection of prior work (his or others) every 15 weeks. He also averaged a non-book story every 6 week. And an essay every 9 days on average. Oh and also an average of about 6 letters or postcards per day(!). For his books (authored + edited) that comes to an average rate about two orders of magnitude under Amazon's limit. Even if Asimov had stopped writing non-book stories, essays, letters, and postcards to devote more time to books, he probably would still be an order of magnitude away from hitting Amazon's limit. I assume Amazon wanted to set their limit high enough that no legitimate human authors would hit it, but they were way more conservative than they needed to be.
- WheelsAtLarge 3y agoI can see where some people are acting as publishers for other authors or are commissioning others to create books for publishing so they can upload multiple books at a time. I'd be interested in knowing who can hit the limit and why. Quality is another thing. A while back my library was purchasing tech related kindle books just because of the title. I know this since I borrowed one and it was just garbage. It was a combination of Wikipedia articles plus stuff that was gathered from the web with no editing. But yes, I see your point.
- iancmceachern 3y agoAgatha Christie took 3-4 months for each book... https://www.agathachristie.com/news/2021/a-life-in-numbers-1890-1976#:~:text=3%2D4%20months%3A%20Agatha%20Christie's,months%20to%20write%20a%20book https://www.agathachristie.com/news/2021/a-life-in-numbers-1....
- bizzletk 3y agoFolding Ideas on youtube has an excellent explanation of the business model behind the rise of EBook Spam. The Mikkelson Twins are running a massive MLM scheme but instead of steak knives or scented candles, it's "training and support for creating your own EBook Passive Income Stream" which leads to what we see on Amazon ebook listings. The video also goes into the darker side of the incentives that lead people to commission ghostwriters, AI editors and the crushing labour demands of the people employed to write these books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
- Freedom2 3y agoWhy not just charge 20c every time the book is opened on Kindle?