AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon's Bestseller Lists
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Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited bestseller list was full of books with titles like “Apricot bar code architecture” and “Jessica’s Attention” earlier this week.

My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.

  • Southrydge Freedom@vlemmy.netEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    It’s honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed

    • blindsight@beehaw.orgEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • hazeebabee@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        What genres are you looking for? There are a couple good communities, but youre right, not nearly as big or as niche as most subreddits. Though ive found the reccomendations to be higher quality when i do see them.

        • Dusty@l.dustybeer.comEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          For me it’s fantasy. Stuff like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Joe Abercrombe or R A Salvatore etc… If you have a suggestion for an active community that’s not on discord I’d love to hear it.

          • Zagaroth@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Seconding Royal Road.

            Fair disclaimer: I am an author on there. :) Stories are free (generally), but lots of authors have Patreons going.

          • hazeebabee@slrpnk.netEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Hmmm I am more of a sci-fi person, but I’ve definitely still seen some threads talking about fantasy books. I’m guessing you’re already on the main book communities like !books@lemmy.ml !literature@beehaw.org ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community !fantasy@lemmy.ml – which does admittedly have pretty low traffic (though, you could be the change you want to see…). I found one niche community that was very recently made !cozyfantasy@wayfarershaven.eu

            I get how hard it can be to find active book reading communities & wish I had more suggestions in the fantasy realm. If you have a specific sub genre in mind, search for it or maybe even make a community for it. I was surprised to find a few different scifi sub genres already had active communities on lemmy & even recently made communities are growing fairly quickly with the new users.

            Good luck finding your next page turner & lmk if you want sci-fi recs :)

            Edit: to add and un-add exclamation points

            • sgtlighttree@kbin.social
              0·
              1 year ago

              Just a heads up, I think you should remove the exclamation points in your links, it resulted in a 404 for me before I removed them.

              • fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
                2·
                1 year ago

                using a exclamation mark should work, and it does work exactly as intended for me. Each of these links properly opens to the community on my local instance

              • hazeebabee@slrpnk.net
                1·
                1 year ago

                thanks for the heads up, ill change that

                update: I tried removing them, but it made it so the links no longer worked for me, so I put them back

    • VoxAdActa@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • jmp242
        2·
        1 year ago

        One thing we’re re learning is that curating content is necessary. Whether you pay a publisher by buying books they sell or crowdsorce via some website, it’s near impossible to just yourself go through the firehose.