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I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires) | Jane Friedman (janefriedman.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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tl;dr Books, most likely generated by an LLM, were being sold on Amazon under Jane Friedman's name. The same books were added to her Goodreads profile. Amazon initially refused to remove the books. If it's happening to her, it's definitely happening to other authors.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is crazy. It's one thing for Amazon to be filled with AI nonsense books but it's quite another for them to have a real author's name attached to them without their knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Amazon has turned to absolute shit. Fake books and cheap Chinese crap. Why even bother with them anymore?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because they have been around long enough that small niche businesses closed, and you can't get what you need locally, so you go through Amazon or another website that wants to charge 20 bucks shipping on a 6 dollar item.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sort of. Mostly this is just what happens when you build a platform that allows basically anyone to sell something on it. Local businesses have limited space, so necessarily they needed to limit product to trusted brands/partners/publishers.

Amazon has actually made it possible for self publishing to exist. There are a lot of successful authors now that never would have made it in the old 'local bookstore buys books from publishing house' paradigm.

But this of course has also opened the floodgates for scammers which utilize those same indie-friendly options to try to exploit people.

I think the issues are a little more nuanced than just 'local business good, Amazon bad'. Not that I think Amazon is good, I just think there are real, valid reasons why small bookstores (and their large book publishers) had problems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I was thinking more general of Amazon as in products it sells, rather than only books. Book stores here have been damaged by Chapters/Indigo chains opening up.