Books were being "killed" far prior to AI.

If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).

In other words, the market already sees no value in books. If it did, the money would be pouring in for this type of work. AI isn't the problem.

AI might be the solution, though. It is conceivable that AI could find a way to make books appealing to the market in a way that humans have failed to discover.

I do think, however, that book sales are going to continue becoming more dependent on author-as-person style marketing. Some of the most lucrative books in recent years were functionally add-on products to whatever the author's main "business" is, and the author themselves went on dozens of podcasts, etc. to tell their story. The days of being an unknown mass-market writer that mails a manuscript to a publisher then disappears, is probably over.

- AI will raise the floor in a lot of industries, more quickly than it will raise the ceiling. I don't see a problem with that. Less garbage is nice.

- Good writers will make use of AI to be better, much as they (and we in general) did with the internet, and so many other technologies before that.

- If we can not tell good or bad apart, then we should be extremly suspicious in how far it actually matters, specially with everything that is not grounded in physics. Truth is fickle. Feeling ambivalent about things that can not be argued away by way of physics is probably a good thing on average.

- Bullshit detection has always been an issue and will continue to be so. As far as I can tell, we have been getting better, not worse, at this (if you consider the absolutely monumental increase in total bullshit generation that we had to cope with over the past years.)

- In the end, as per usual, despite all claims to the contrary, people will not care how it was made. All that will matter is if it does something for somebody. Note that how it was created might do something for somebody, or, more likely, a certain illusion of how it was made will be good enough and more economical. Over time the sentimental power will fade.

EDIT: Tangent: I run a book recommendation platform and am envisaging having to implement a pre-2021 lock-in/time-freeze as my data is about to get massively polluted by the AI Boom.

AI is really helpful in this case, reduce technical books, gives very short and sweet answers -> This all we need either book or AI.

AI can't become Adolf Hitler, so the view point of the Author still remains. AI can't replace it.

The author complains that they are finding bad content when they search for books. Guess what, that's a search problem not a problem with the content. Search is only useful if it returns relevant results. All this talk of betrayal and trust is just a symptom of crappy search or recommendation algorithms. It doesn't win any sympathy that they are also complaining about free books on Kindle Unlimited so they aren't even cheated out of money, they simply lost a tiny bit of time since they indicate they can quickly identify machine generated content.

This

> There is no feeling of betrayal like thinking you are about to read something that another person slaved over, only to discover you've been tricked.

and this

> Part of the reason people invest so many hours into reading is because we know the author invested far more in writing.

are incomprehensible to me as they appear to be some subset of sadism that derives pleasure from someone enduring a form of hardship. Not quite the same since parts of creative work are enjoyable but still weird because any form of creative work will inevitably have large sections of difficult, tedious or just unpleasant effort that goes into it. Saying that something has less value to you because its creator used a tool to make the bad parts easier to do is just wrongheaded. The only argument that could stand is if the tool they use made their output worse in which case it is justifiable to criticize it but the same goes for an author who doesn't bother to edit his own work or to ask another person to check it and edit or takes other shortcuts like ignoring consistency or using tired plot devices or copying some popular style.

> Good writing kills its darlings. If you don't care enough about a section to write it, then I don't care enough to read it.

That is just not what that phrase means. "Kill your darlings" means to throw away parts that you care about, it's literally the exact opposite of what they're saying here.

Honestly just skimming the rest it seems the author does a lot of work to paint a picture but it doesn't do much to support the argument. A great deal is made of the effort it takes to read a book and decide if it's worthy of recommending or selling in a book store. This just ties back to the search problem and is ironically a place where LLMs and similar ML tools could help a great deal since they can make for excellent classification and recommendation engines. It's pointless to complain about the volume of books since this was already an untenable problem with only human authors and the sheer weight of history. The author says that a book seller may read 80 books a year, certainly an accomplishment but absolutely nothing compared to the number of books published each year[0]:

- 500,000 to 1 million from traditional publishers

- 1.7 million from self-publishing

- 130 million globally

Once again, it's a search problem. When you have 130 million new titles per year it really doesn't matter if you make it 230 million or 1 billion if your solution is to chip away at it 80 titles at a time, you need automation. Fixing search and recommendation is the only thing that will impact the awareness and advertising side of the business. If you don't fix it then yes publishers will carry more weight for their ability to vet their authors but this is nothing new and was not meaningfully impacted by digital publishing as already established. I'm afraid the thing the author is decrying is exactly the medicine they need.

[0] https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-20...

Central command seems to have instructed drones to use “already” as a means to gaslight people into thinking there’s use and demand for this gibberish. Dont fall for it.

But then also consider the change in this price as energy consumption changes, as a result of jobs becoming AI.

A few put them up on third-party bookseller sites for a time, and I've been able to get a lot of rare and notable works for comparatively little money. Actually, a lot of them come from university libraries, so maybe they're not as much of an exception as I think.

Now ebooks and on-demand printing allow you to "publish" books without going through the quality filter of a publisher. But you won't get into a book store that way, and anybody talking about the trouble of archiving those better already have an archive of the low hanging fruit of the same category: fanfiction.org and friends (and I don't mean this derogatory, there are great stories in there)

Surely, there are multiple sci-fi stories exploring this exact premise. I would love some recommendations in my replies.

* discernment requires effort.. someone has to make an effort, and do it effectively. In the city, time is money. Few to none in the "competitive retail markets" will seize the day to waste, making no money in discernment. Hollywood knows this for decades, and has many many ways to deal.

"She knew a good movie from a bad one, and knew how to sell both" was an epitaph for a crooked Hollywood agent, who was murdered by mobsters in her 50s not long ago...

* Publication incentives.. as noted many times here today, those who pay to advertise, do not have the incentives of discernment you are so confident in.

* Security by Obscurity -- in a blizzard of new publications with new incentive and cost structure, you will apparently find the perfect snowflakes to promote to other snowflake lovers? maybe.. for a minute.. but look! more snow

source: years in the book industry in a big University town before the Internet

Sure there would be the usual shenanigans when it comes to gatekeeping and objectivity but in the end it could still be valuable.

I think there is some truth to this in that it's likely profitable to flood the market with mediocre products (especially if you do it through a white label network of "competing" brands) as long as you can avoid refunds (and on Amazon certain sellers make returns intentionally difficult by providing Chinese addresses without a prepaid label, making you pay more for the return shipping than you likely paid for the product to begin with). This also drives down the overall expectation of quality and reduces market pressures for quality while also completely swamping any competitor trying to sell a genuinely high quality product by making reviews completely unreliable.

I don't think this is a coordinated strategy as with whitelabel dropshipping being sold as a get-rich-quick-scheme for years there's no real need for it. Plus as you mention in many cases this is simply a consequence of a race to the bottom earlier in the supply chain resulting in nearly identical mediocre products even when some parts differ.

Personally I've run into this when picking out interior doors for our new house: despite being in the mid-tier price range, various aspects ranging from the veneer to the locks are extremely underwhelming but apparently on par with other doors in that price range. There's literally no reason the locks should feel like cheap plastic toys but it's something that's not visible and can't usually be tested even in a show room so apparently that's where they decide to cut corners. And because even standard sizes are considered custom, there's no way to return them, let alone once installed.

Many people argue this is bad and should be changed. But it's debatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Opera...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor

It means books get written now which explore perspectives and voices unheard before, which in turn can help us readers expand our frame of reference.

The collective works of fiction written before 1900 tend to reflect the societal viewpoints of well-off white men (even when written by women or specifically dealing with societal ills). Go a few decades beyond that and you see authors from a working class background join the chorus, then more women, a broadening of sexual themes reflecting society's change (feminism, sexual liberation, homosexuality, etc.), more open criticism of religion too. Digital technology changed society significantly, and this is of course reflected in writing from the more recent decades, and coming up towards today you see more and more diversity amongst authors, adding — through the characters and narratives they create — yet more perspectives and insights. Sometimes pushing the envelope of a specific field, sometimes getting rid of tropes which no longer convince. Fiction changes constantly and will always be rooted in the year it was written.

You sell yourself short if you stop at 1940.

I think people still write good books which can provide good insights into the human condition, it's just hard to find them in the present.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/21995.Best_21st_Century_...

“White” is a modern social abstraction that rapidly breaks down the further back you try to apply it. It also carries with it loaded assumptions that do not really hold even at a population level in different places. This is exactly what I mean: immersing yourself in modern culture blinds you to the reality people did not and could not apply such categories because they did not even exist. People often repeat that race is a social construct but rarely think about what that really means.

People in past cultures were totally alien. There’s some substrate of common humanity but trying to say, apply modern racial privilege politics to Xenophon’s encounter with the very pale Paphlagonians, or the widespread trafficking of European slaves even into modernity in Northern Africa and Anatolia, or even into parts of colonial America is just nonsensical.

I mean, take this quote from Benjamin Franklin for example, which would have been early in the conception of modern race:

> Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

This is a completely bizarre Martian take to any of us alive today. The past was a foreign country. If you just stamp your feet and repeat “all old books is just rich white men” you’re not only completely wrong but missing genuinely different perspectives.

As an aside, what does it mean to not have a reasonably good understanding, as a man, of a woman’s perspective in 2024? Did you have mother, sisters, or cousins? No friends or girlfriend or wife? No empathy? As a last resort never read mumsnet or 2X? Ignoring the fact that once again highlighting the sex differences ignores the fact there are literally four billion women and they all have different perspectives, they’re not a hive mind, if you have to read a book to figure out the common differences in perspective…hasn’t something really gone wrong in society for that to even be possible? And could a book by some woman you don’t know and had some kind of connections or very unique experience - she got published after all - really tell you more than having long and deep empathetic conversations with people you actually know?

Books are great because they’re a window into that we can never see for ourselves. Literally 50% of the people on Earth right now are a different sex. You can find out what they think right now with no effort. We don’t need the nth book on “what it’s like to be an X in America”, we all know, everyone is shouting it from the rooftops. I’d trade it all for more Sappho, and I’m a member of a minority group that could write my own What It’s Like to Be An X in America book.