Fake Books at Zon

From Nathan Bransford:

If you’ve spent any time on Amazon searching for books lately, you probably know that it’s become an absolute wasteland of junk–A.I. imitations of real authors, garbage A.I. “books,” shady third party sellers, and knockoffs galore. One author, David Goggins, a former Navy SEAL who once did 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours, has sued Amazon over counterfeit copies of his self-published books being sold on Amazon.

As publisher Ken Whyte notes, what’s extraordinary about this is that Goggins exclusively sells on Amazon, who is essentially functioning as Goggins’ publisher and distributor. The fact that Goggins, who has sold millions of copies, has had to resort to legal action against his own publisher to deal with counterfeit copies shows the extent to which Amazon simply does not seem to care about reining in fraudulent third parties because they take a cut of the sale anyway.

And woe betide the smaller authors (both literally and metaphorically) without the platform and resources to deal with this problem. I worry this is the bleeding edge of an era where generative A.I. drowns us all in garbage, with the only “winners” being scammers and tech CEOs.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford