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Amazon restricts authors from self-publishing more than three books a day after AI concerns

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 was previously no limit to the number of books authors could list a day.

JustZ , (edited )
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

Wow! Only three bookks a day? Publish or parish thing has gotten out of control.

Blackdoomax ,

George R. R. Martin: ok.

echodot ,

That isn’t a limit even Stephen King probably would struggle to release one book a month, let alone three books a day.

I want to meet an author who is genuinely inconvenienced by this.

phoenixz ,

If you’re gone go that way, then limit it to one book per MONTH, anything faster than that would be suspect

phorq ,

Unless they’re short stories, or someone putting out a chapter at a time for cheap and then compiling them into collections later. Still 3 chapters a day is pretty extreme, maybe a chapter a day I could see if you have the work ethic of Stephen King.

phoenixz ,

Which again limits you to tops maybe 1-2 books a month, let.alone a day

Chailles ,
@Chailles@lemmy.world avatar

On the other hand though, say you’ve been writing a web novel that could be sliced up into 3 separate books or you just have 3 books that’s only now getting released. You could release them over time or you could choose to have all 3 go up at once. Not to mention as a first act of defense, it’s a reasonable action to make and is easily adjustable later on.

There’s probably other reasons why someone would release more than one book at once that’s completely understandable, especially when considering what technically counts as a “book” such as translations or a company publishing titles of multiple authors under one name,

SoaringDE ,

Make it 12 in a year then

echodot ,

Multiple authors published in one book wouldn’t happen in self-publishing because there’s no incentive. The point about a collection of short stories is that it isn’t economical for a publisher to publish them individually, but with self-publishing that economic restriction doesn’t exist.

JackbyDev ,

I don’t see a problem with someone publishing a backlog of multiple books at once. 3 per day seems pretty reasonable. Maybe even something like 3 per day and at most 10 per month might work.

phoenixz ,

A backlog doesn’t give you 3 per day sustained. Limit publishing tone book per day still gives you 30 books per month. Even with a backlog that should be way more than even Stephen King would need.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Chuck Tingle was pumping out multiple a month before language models were a thing.

Blackmist ,

Oh no, now the AI will have to think up new author names as well!

phorq ,

Not defending Amazon, but… despite allowing unlimited pen names, they all have to be under the same account. Multiple publishing accounts can get you banned, and good luck explaining why multiple accounts have the same financial information when you go to withdraw your $5.

LetterboxPancake ,

Three books a day is completely plausible, but four? Nobody can type that fast. /s

LillyPip ,

As an author, this doesn’t hurt me at all. I write fast, but not that fast.

Sad they have to do this, but I can’t see what actual person this hurts. If you’ve somehow hoarded a backlog of dozens of titles, it might take several days to publish them. That’s advantageous if you’re legit, anyhow.

What worries me is this won’t hinder AI at all.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Thanks for messing it up for those of us who can pump out a 10 book series in just under 16 hours. Thanks a lot.

drbi ,

Disgusting. How do you write a book using AI?

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Badly.

kate ,

Roughly like this, I guess? chat.openai.com/…/8d9e4d35-826b-4181-931b-fcfcc08…

SaltySalamander ,
@SaltySalamander@kbin.social avatar

No author publishing even 1 book a week is legit. 3 books a day? Yea, that's still AI.

snooggums ,
@snooggums@kbin.social avatar

They could have written them and are just getting around to publishing them on Amazon if it is a one time thing.

Do they short stories as titles? Stephen King could have cranked out that many if he didn't care about quality control back in his cocaine days.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

if he didn’t care about quality control back in his cocaine days.

He kind of didn’t.

blivet ,

I suppose the idea is that it’s possible that someone has written several books in the past, and wants to sell them on Amazon now.

Windex007 ,

Imagine if it took an entire week to list your life’s work on Amazon.

XTornado ,

Plus multiple editions, languages, etc.

Burninator05 ,

They even admit this rule is trash.

The rule change will “probably not” be a “gamechanger for managing the influx of AI-written content on Amazon’s platform,”

MooseBoys ,

3 books a day? Yea, that’s still AI.

It seems plausible that an author might have a catalogue of more than 3 books and might choose to publish them on Amazon all at the same time. Still, that could probably be alleviated by having the throttling kick in after some initial threshold is reached, say 12 total.

Fisch ,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

But then they could also just create new accounts, no?

Ravi ,

A book in one language yes, but don’t forget translations. Books of famous writers are sometimes released in multiple languages on the same day.

lud ,

Do famous writers self publish?

Ravi ,

Probably not, but it strongly depends on the implementation by Amazon, if it has any effect.

qyron ,

Many authors write parallel works, so it is not impossible to in fact have more than one work ready for publishing at the same time. It even makes more sense if we consider that different books will take different amounts of time to proofread, review, etc.

What I do like is, because of this, publishing as it exists can be shooting itself on the foot.

If it becomes accepted that an independent author requires real time to write a book, then the same is true for a publisher backed one. So, if an author can churn out more than one work trough that channel than the indie one, that may imply the publisher is in fact using shadow writers to put more books out than humanly feasable.

There are incredibly talented and focused author that will put out a lot of work in a short time window but that is not the rule for the average person.

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

What if I publish really short stories? What if I let GPT write the books, but I edit them heavily so that they fit my vision? I’m pretty sure I could publish one story every week that way.

themajesticdodo ,

Then you wouldn’t be writing anything, would you?

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

Editing involves more than just deleting and rearranging text. It’s sort of like adding the final touch here and there. In the case of GPT created text, the editing process will be particularly heavy handed, and it involves a surprising amount of writing.

MossBear ,

Just a reminder that if you’re using ai to write your book, your book has less worth than your last dump.

mayonaise_met ,

I’m not a writer, but ai is a fantastic tool to brainstorm ideas. Just never ever trust it.

orphiebaby ,

This is not a solution.

DessertStorms ,
@DessertStorms@kbin.social avatar

Amazon restricts authors from self-publishing more than three books a day after AI concerns

Amazon enables AI books to continue self-publishing
FTFY

If they actually wanted to stop them they could, easily, but why would they, they clearly make them easy money..

gullible ,

I 110% guarantee that this issue was brought to the attention of several people with the ability to rapidly implement a fix, but the subject was dropped when cost to develop was mentioned. Amazon is the glass and steel incarnation of human malice.

Deebster ,
@Deebster@lemmyrs.org avatar

What's this easy fix then? Just a lower number? That will just mean more publishers.

AI detection tools don't work, and humans aren't much better, unless they're subject experts. How do we stop AI books?

lloram239 ,

How do we stop AI books?

You don’t. There are plenty of legitimate cases for using AI (translation, spell check, summaries, etc.). The solution should be to use AI to categorize all the books and their content, something in the style of Steam-tags, but going even deeper into what is actually in the book and done by machine, as nobody has time to read all those books.

This is kind of the biggest surprise in this recent rise of AI: We got to generation before categorization took of. Even so a lot of the AI work in the last 10 years has been focused on categorizing, nobody has build anything with it, at least not user accessible. Everything is still running on human made categories. The only time you see categorization in action is in the recommendation algorithms of Youtube or TikTok, but the categories that drive them are hidden from the users.

AlexWIWA ,

I’m waiting for a self hosted organization ML that can find my desired data in the thousands of documents and pictures

LetterboxPancake ,

And the AIs probably run in AWS, so it generates them money while it generates them money.

danhab99 ,
@danhab99@programming.dev avatar

What kind of an author is publishing more than 3 books a day??? Who is mad about this?

ivanafterall ,
@ivanafterall@kbin.social avatar

Brandon Sanderson comes to mind.

Zorque ,

Considering he's already sworn off Amazon, I dont think that's an issue.

Nepenthe ,
@Nepenthe@kbin.social avatar

I was going to say this is a devastating blow to James Patterson's team of ghostwriters

Taleya ,

Chuck tingle, stephen king, good thing Asimov died or we’d have chaos on our hands

captainlezbian ,

Chuck Tingle may have to slow down a bit but that’s ok, he deserves evenings off

clay_pidgin ,

Dr. Chuck Tingle is the only buckaroo I could think of who might hit this volume. Don’t forget to SHOW LOVE!

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Pounded in the Butt by Amazon’s Less Than 3 Self-Published Books a Day Restriction

kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E ,

3 per Day, really? Lol

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