An article from Vox this week explored why exactly Amazon is filled with so many garbage ebooks, and the answer is infuriatingly straightforward. AI makes it easy to generate content, Amazon makes it too easy to publish large volumes of ebooks with minimal quality standards and effective growth hacker marketing makes it easy to promote these ebook to unsuspecting consumers on the largest online retail platform in the world.
Recently Amazon, in a half-hearted attempt to address the problem, limited the number of ebooks an author can publish to three per day … conveniently ignoring the reality that if you’re publishing three books a day, they are most probably filled with AI-generated bullshit anyway, so this “limit” is quantifiably useless. This may seem like a problem without a solution, but consider how Wikipedia works as an alternative.
On that platform, the shared responsibility to prevent any content that doesn’t fit Wikipedian standards is so entrenched there are entire articles pleading with site editors to avoid “overzealous deletion.” Amazon could use some of that overzeal. What if one of the world’s richest companies put some money towards enlisting the help of Wikipedian editors (or people with similarly aggressive know-it-all personalities) to delete garbage ebooks and offered them micropayments for their efforts?
Or another idea would be to use a reverse rating system where consumers could rate a book as spam and after a set number of spam votes, the book would be taken down. And adjusting the limit to one book per week would also help (and perhaps force some fast-publishing writers to be just a little more thoughtful with what they publish). The point is, self-publishing on Amazon doesn’t have to be the exponentially growing garbage pile that it currently is. Amazon could choose to fix it. They just have to care enough to do it.
