- cross-posted to:
- books@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- books@lemmy.ml
My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
I wouldn’t classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it’s a very solvable problem and there’s no market for books full of word salad. I can’t see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn’t sell.
They are competing for attention of potential buyers. In terms of sales new authors are similar to these spammy nonsense books. Therefore when Amazon chooses a “new author to promote” chances are it’s going to be a spammy one instead of more genuine work. I agree that amazon should react to this as it should hurt their brand from both an authors and readers point of view
What’s odd is that this isn’t an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what’s happening pretty fast.
The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they’re doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.
This is what I’m having trouble with: how are word salad books at the top of their “bestsellers” list - is anyone buying them? If someone is buying them, then are others buying them just because they appear on the bestseller list?
It doesn’t pass the sniff test.
My guess is that Amazon gives new books some visibility if they manage to score a dozen sales within a few days of release. So the author probably bought a few copies as soon as his listing appeared on the store. It’s a very old tactic that plagues the best seller’s list and Amazon is plagued by the same issue.