From The Guardian:
Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.
The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. “While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations,” read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon’s site.
Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted “if needed”. The company confirmed that there had already been a limit to the number of books authors could list a day, but declined to say what this previous limit was.
The post stated that Amazon is “actively monitoring the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing” and that “very few” publishers will be affected by the change. Authors and publishers will also have the option to seek an exception to the rule.
The rule change will “probably not” be a “gamechanger for managing the influx of AI-written content on Amazon’s platform,” said Dr Miriam Johnson, senior lecturer in publishing at Oxford Brookes University. “It will dent the numbers a bit, but for those who are making money by flooding the market with AI-generated books and publishing more than three a day, they will find a work-around.”
The three-book limit announcement comes a week after Amazon introduced the requirement for authors to inform the company when their content is AI-generated and added a new section to their guidelines featuring definitions of “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted” content. Johnson said that though the disclosure requirement is a “nice idea”, she questions how Amazon would check whether authors are disclosing AI-generated content.
Link to the rest at The Guardian
I once applied for a position as a developer at Amazon. Rather thankful I never even got a phone interview. The whack-a-mole game is amusing – for a very short time.
Patterns. If someone is uploading even three books every day, something is wonky – and merits attention from a human.
Even the 20Booksto50K people don’t get anywhere near that.
More than 3 a week would be suspicious for even pulp speed writers.
Time to dust this one off from 2014:
https://deanwesleysmith.com/the-new-world-of-writing-pulp-speed/
One other thing Amazon can do is time stamp books by date and time.
Too much content too quick by a publisher would bring quality control into question to a prospective buyer.
Well, not necessarily. I’m finishing book 3 of a not-yet-released series, and plan to release all 3 books at the same time while I’m working on book 4, to build up a concentrated interest.
I can’t be the only one doing that.
This is the usual flawed reaction of people in authority who think they understand how systems work when they aren’t sophisticated enough to understand how they are actually used by legitimate people.
That’s one strategy.
Another strategy I’ve seen here is to pub the first, list the followups for preorder ( say a month apart, even if done) and stay on the new releases list for the better part of the year.
It was called “one in and five in the chute” or something like that.
I don’t think either approach is particularly common, though.
Most indies publish as they finish so the system Amazon put up targets the outliers and warns folks bringing in a lot of (reverted?) titles to space them out a bit.
Blame the scammers: Amazon isn’t terribly proactive so if they’re doing this, somebody has been doing it already.