I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restric...
Maybe simple self-help books can be written a little faster, because they are shorter. A maximum set in words -- instead of books -- might work better; say 100-150k words per year?
But would that be enough? Wouldn't grifters create a multitude of accounts to publish their books?
Maybe the solution would be some kind of automated system to evaluate the quality of a book? It needn't be fine-grained, it would simply output "trash/non trash" and could try to test whether the book contains any new information not available elsewhere, or whether there are entire paragraphs taken verbatim from wikihow.
But AI-generated books may be hard to spot. Maybe there's no solution.
Of course there will be outliers in any category, but even then... 100 million words divided by 60 years of activity (?) is 1.6 million words a year, every single year of that period. I don't think that's possible for just one man.
But ghostwriting is as old as writing.
they are not incentivized to do so, since they profit from the fakes; only if/when this results in customers disengaging from Amazon altogether and total sales decreasing, will it be seen as a problem
They buy a lot of ads so I guess Amazon likes them.
The text screams ChatGPT.
Amazon has given up on AI.
... with no evidence of charlatanism, note.
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.
My latest attempt resulted in 1/3 of the goods being returned because they could be sourced cheaper elsewhere (eg AliExpress) after they were tested, or they were swapped by the buyer with defective goods purchase elsewhere returned (they had heavy wear). In the case where the goods were still functional, the packaging was damaged and I had to pay for the returns.
My conclusion is that amazons liberal return policies only allow something to be sold profitably at a 2-3x markup. Hence everything being garbage.
I won’t attempt it again.
As a vendor, I can’t imagine dealing with a high percentage of returns. I don’t know what the solution is.
Also, here in EU, amazon recently reduced their return window, from 30 days to 14 days after receiving, so some limits are being put in place, because some of my friends order a lot of things to make unboxing videos/tiktok and other crap and then return it, which is real waste.
Like stores that sold physical goods had to price in things like staff or shoplifting or business rates.
Amazon's thrown in the towel on streaming and decided it'd rather be an ad-supported model with Freevee (which also eventually inherits Prime-exclusive shows).
For the rare instances I do want to order something physical from Amazon, waiting isn't a problem. For the rest of the time, I'd rather my dollars go anywhere else.
When someone like me looks at Walmart and says "There's a more ethical alternative", Amazon might have a problem.
But I assume Amazon retail leadership is self aware they're milking the long tail of historical brand cachet while under-investing in their future, at this point.
AWS and maybe some other businesses spin off, adios to the remainder as Sears 2.0.
The scope of humanity that use Amazon is gigantic, and the percentage of us pedantic, technically knowledgeable folks who'd give up some convenience, time, or even the purchase of an item, as part of a "righteous crusade" is vanishingly small.
Amazon may even increase their sales as consumer X purchases a replacement "thing 2" because "thing 1" was dead on arrival, and money these days ain't worth the hassle of returning or getting a refund on "thing 1".
Specialty items are still hard, but I'm not buying a hammer from Amazon when my local supermarkets all carry it and I can physically inspect and heft the product.
It does seem ridiculous that chain stores still haven't figured out how to have a good online shopping experience.
> Specialty items are still hard
I stopped using Amazon years ago, and what I've done for specialized items is to find the actual manufacturer and order directly from them. This works 80-90% of the time. When it doesn't work, then I hit up the likes of craigslist, eBay, etc.
They also all seem to have an orange colored website.
Thanks for advertising it to me, but it might be futile. After having had my experience with the Amazon shopping giant, and how it fell from grace, I do not care to "invest" in another giant that will eventually end the same way.
Sure, not all of those downloads will have resulted in a purchase - but the same is true of Amazon.
The point is that Temu is takes the "masses of cheap crap" aspect of Amazon, and makes a virtue of it. It's effectively the Ryanair model - most people want cheap crap, so why bother with the last vestiges of Amazon-style customer service when you can ditch all that and be even cheaper and crappier?
Amazon Music playing ads even during purchased songs.
Kindle tokens expiring as soon as you stop your monthly subscription.
Enough is enough.
A competing "direct from the manufacturer" sales site would be useful. Only the business that actually makes the thing could sell it. No intermediaries.
I've saved a good deal of money, and waiting a couple extra days for delivery has only been a minor inconvenience .
I had the same thought a couple weeks ago regarding direct-from-manufactuerer product search / purchase. I'd use it regularly.
I cancelled both Netflix and Amazon Prime last year and decided to do account hopping on a month by month basis. Their greed is what triggered this. Both have gone down a path of less and less interesting content, price increases, and now indeed this ad driven bullshit. I realized I'm paying 20 euros per month for both and struggling to find something worth watching for months.
So, I cancelled both and went over to Apple TV. They don't have a lot but what they have is quite nice. Once I'm done with that, I'll consider what to subscribe to next. Criteria here: whatever I pick has to have stuff I want to watch (ad free, obviously) and I'll unsubscribe the second I get bored. I'm done paying for multiple streaming services at the same time. I only want the good stuff. I'm not interested in the generic filler content, B movies, etc. that are cheap to license but horrible to watch.
I might come back to Netflix or Prime periodically to check certain shows. But not on a permanent basis. If more people do this, that gives them a nice price signal that they need to invest in quality.
It started from using Amazon to research and then looking for alternative larger online stores to buy from when product+shipping more or less matched Amazon.
A couple of times I have found good deals direct from the manufacture that were not available elsewhere, so I make a point of checking there as well now.
It feels like companies are able to setup a competent online store more easily now (billing and logistics).
Some of these tricks may be used for physical products as well, but at least they need to deliver a physical product. In the case of spam ebooks, this pipeline takes care of everything. You click around for a few hours, launch the software: bam, 20 junk books with just enough content to not warrant refunds and SEO'd titles to get at least a few dozen sales.
I looked into this well over a decade ago; back then, you could buy a set of DVDs that would teach (and, perhaps, assist) you in perpetrating this. I get the appeal: back then a popular category was tax tip books. Scrape some tips from here and there, slap on a dozen titles and author names, and sell for low enough that people don't mind taking a chance on your crap. Pity Amazon still hasn't made any successful steps against this.
Without enough demand no one would do it.
Even without kids, life is just so wonderful and intense to actually experience, stuff I pick up for just sitting and reading better have amazing reviews by many thousands. Yes, I won't support much some new starting author this way (but then if he wins say Hugo it gets on my list) but my time and well being is simply higher priority for me.
(Also: to me, blaming demand is a bit victim blaming - these scams are deliberately set up to entice as many readers as possible.)
How it's different than any other low-quality literature which was always in abundance on the market? Except before copywriting cost $500 and now generated one cost $20 to produce.
Who should be ultimate censor of what books must be released an what books shouldn't?
PS: Same way some people love to buy cheap trash from AliExpress for $1.99 and at least generated books dont create actual e-waste, CO2 footprint and other pollution. And Amazon is now full with trash from AliExpress just 2x more expensive.
"They" use software to create many slightly tweaked copies under seemingly different author names. So the low effort of one cobbled together book takes the space of 20 or 30 books. I.e. anyone not playing this game is quickly drowned out by the ones who do.
> Who should be ultimate censor of what books must be released an what books shouldn't?
The issue isn't censorship - or actually, it kind of is, but then by the fraudsters "censoring" non-fraudster books by swamping the market.
But the problem is where else can you buy things online where this isn't a problem these days? Everywhere has become a marketplace akin to Alibaba (where people traditionally accepted the tradeoff of poor reliability in exchange for good prices when decent products were actually delivered).
Buying without meeting these conditions will only yield garbage and scams.
Yes, that was a typo but I'm leaving it.
Linked doco by Dan Olson. Strong recommend.
- "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
- "Line Goes Up" (2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
- "The Future is a Dead Mall" (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q
Its about the fallout of the memestock craze and where the community ends up.
Which actually raises the interesting question: just how can you even entertain a belief that you'd somehow leverage billion-dollar profits in such a situation? I mean, I know it's completely divorced from reality. I can understand the appeal of the conspiracy theory, I can understand how they think they've found the one loophole that makes infinite money, I can understand the proof-by-contortionist-decoding-of-secret-messages. But not how you can even seriously think, in a world where you found the thread that will let you pull one over the big guys in a serious way, that the government--the people whom you believe to be colluding with the Big Them™ to screw you over--will willingly be held hostage by you in the grand climax and let you extort great gains rather than changing the rules of the game (which is literally their job). I mean, in standard apocalyptic literature, it's the role of God--a higher power not subject to the observable rules of the game--who plays the role of wreaking the final vengeance and rewarding the pious faithful; but here, in this theory, it's the bad guys who are supposed to wreak vengeance against themselves and reward their enemies for being faithful to the higher script.
The other thing is I think the video is still a bit premature; it was written soon after the bankruptcy of Bed, Bath & Beyond, so it doesn't have much to go on for how the movement evolved afterwards, and I would have liked to learn more about that.
groupthink and in-group morality. The HODLers have a feeling of righteousness when they think about brining down the system
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
What's amazing to me is reading about what the crypto thieves and smart contract exploiters do with the funds they've taken. It seems common for a person who's managed to acquire $100K USD worth of ETH or Solana to then turn around and buy some NFTs with it.
I'm like: "Dude, you just had a great payday, now you get to ride off into the sunset with your ill-gotten gains." But either they are crazy, the world is crazy, or I'm going crazy. I don't understand it all.
Amazing
Previously, publishers would do similar due diligence - someone at the house would actually read the book, if not work with authors.
Due diligence of this nature is not now particularly common. There is no cost risk with a digital book. It could be, and often is, written by those without the talent to match their ambition. If one is looking for new authors to read, it's very difficult to sort through the dreck.
Let the libraries sort through the dreck for you. Pro-tip: gift your local library a mere $100. They'll love you for it and invite you to all sorts of interesting gatherings. You might meet a good book, or even better, a good person.
(Then, even further, you might as well just cut out Amazon as the middleman if you're so inclined, or look for a local book store that has online purchases.)
Remember "Snooki"? Four books for sale on Amazon, all published by a "reputable publisher" (in fact, a division of Simon and Schuster).
Of the current top 20 best sellers list:
https://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-books-Amazon/zgbs/books/...
I'd rate at least 15 as "garbage books" on sight.
"Reputable publishers" are in business to make money. Some of them may put on airs of intellectual quality, but in fact if trash books make a buck, they will publish them. If high-quality books are unlikely to make a profit, they will not.
Wait in the queue? What's fundamentally wrong with that? If something's worth reading, it's worth waiting for. Do we really have to have everything right now?
Nothing of course, patience is a lost virtue and relevant to the topic of the thread, it's no accident that the only thing Amazon has gotten better at is shipping garbage faster.
In fact when it comes to the current popular thing, just go for the unpopular thing that nobody else is interested in because chances are there's something more interesting in it anyway. There's also this community on reddit of people who on principle wait a few years before they play games. Time is literally the best filter. Anything that's popular and good will still be interesting in three years.
The problem with amazon books is all the garbage books, but if you know you want "the wheel of time" then it's pretty easy to track that down on amazon or elsewhere.
The only problem popularity presents is if it's somewhat underground. Then you might not stumble on it. Otherwise, just perusing the library should give you a lot of books which are reputable.
And CA libraries have access to courses on Coursera.
Bill and Dave (Michael Malone). The history of Hewlett-Packard.
Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes (Travis Baldree)
Hitch-22 (Christopher Hitchens). his memoir
Hopefully just a temporary glitch, but there's a hard problem of being a gatekeeper and saying "No, that's not a real book".
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.
Because human intelligence is non-computable
It's the terrible Amazon shopping experience which puts no value on the customer getting a good product. EBay (!) is much better.
Even wish refunds faster and less complicated in case of no delivery.
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.
> A seller has some quantity of floor with him. The seller offered his customer that if he/she buys half of the floor he has, he will give half kg of floor as a discount. The first customer accepted his offer and he purchased half of the floor and got half kg as extra. After selling the floor to the first customer he again makes the same offer for the second customer, and so on. The seller left with no quantity of floor after he made the fifth transaction. The initial quantity of floor the seller had?
It's a solvable math puzzle, but has some obvious issues.
One of the later puzzles is pretty funny:
> There are three people (Deepak, Avinash, Prateek ), one is a robot, one is a missile, one of them is a Gun, the robot can either lie or tell the trust, and the Gun always tells the truth, the missile always lies, and the robot can do both he can either lie or he can tell the truth.
> Statements :
> Deepak: Prateek is a missile."
> Avinash: "Deepak is a Gun."
> prateek : "I am the robot."
> Find out the Gun, the missile, and the robot?
The typos and weird formatting from the original.
The final puzzle in the sample is just sort of an incoherent mess:
> You have twenty white and thirteen black balls in a bag. You pull out two balls one after another. If the balls are of identical color, you then definitely replace them with a white ball - however, if they're of various colors, you update them with a black ball. Once you are taking out the balls, you do now no longer place them returned back in the bag - so the balls keep reducing. What will be the color of the final ball remaining in the bag?
I'm not certain of the analogy, but it appears to be something like the white balls are even and the black are odd. Both odd+odd and even+even equal an even (white) number. But odd + even equal an odd number. Since it starts with an odd number of odd numbers, the answer is black.
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:
https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/tw44yu/sentient_vs_...
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!
Now yes I would agree that a fully flat, bottom up, “everyone is a publisher” world where everyone is on equal footing (including the spammers) is impractical, but then again who ever said that would happen or work if it did?
It remains to be seen what effect genAI has on all this, though. Long term, it seems likely that the need for gatekeeping will only increase due to the inevitable flood of more and more generated junk.
It should have been obvious to us that it is easier to create noise than it is to create signal.
The idyllic dream of a free internet with long tails would be replaced with a steadily worsening signal to noise ratio.
We cheered on when Google supplanted Yahoo! because the computers were better at curating than humans.
Man, we clearly sucked at choosing the right path. Dreams of utopia always hit hard when they fall.
All this means is that relying on an algo to filter things for you will become less useful (easy to game). You'll need to rely more on real humans you actually trust.
If you think spammers are the problem, you're missing the bigger picture, by a lot.
Technology should've brought about fewer work hours, instead it brought about mass insanity.
Sure, lots of noise, but lots of signal too.
Meaningful human participation in content approval is still possible of course, with social networks. It can go from getting recommendation from an influencer you align with (for once "influencer" is an appropriate term), or join a community, for example on a Discord server, or for something more public, Reddit. For customer service, Amazon is surprisingly human, at least for the few times I had to deal with them, but generally, it is something you have to pay for, and most people don't want to, but if you do, you can get a human on line.
But the most important part is that you can explore now the wild on your own. Of course, you will be bombarded with noise, but the stuff is there for you to find. Before, it was made much more complicated. For example, now, getting a book in a foreign language may be one click away, before that, you had to hunt for some specialized bookstores, regular bookstores only have best sellers, and ordering, if successful, was slow and sometimes expensive. So, sure, few garbage books, but also a much more limited choice of good books.
"if you know the norms of publishing, you know it’s unethical"
Good grief.
Should have stopped earlier.