14 Comments

Hahaha :D Great, the "authors" seem to not have proof read their book. Not even the author is reading his own book :D

Expand full comment

Ever more reasons to not trust Amazon ratings. What a joke...

Expand full comment

While AI generated texts are astonishingly readable these days and might even be used for recent "spam/scam books", I think these books are more the result of "Contrepreneurs". Dan Olson recently made a good video on this scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw (and also his video "Line Goes Up" on NFTs is a highly recommended view on the topic of NFTs).

Expand full comment
author

Yeah, I'm aware of this trend and can't rule it out - but what doesn't hold water here are the very "inhuman" topic shifts and the fact that what's being described after the shift isn't just some garbled / rephrased stuff from the internet, but some bizarre parallel reality.

Expand full comment
author

Small correction - the original post linked to this Amazon product page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09PM8BGPV/ . This is actually a newer listing; the listing at the time of my purchase was https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B098GY3TR3/ . I updated the link accordingly.

Expand full comment

I once found an author on amazon that only published books like this, all on tech related topics, all of them were basically the same text, changing just one word or another (e.g. tech name) and ramble for pages about "how you can leverage x in your business".

I reported, nothing happened. At least I didn't pay for any of the books because I had kindle unlimited.

Expand full comment

NFT has a pretty strong marketing campaign, maybe these books are kind of part of it. Probably no one buys any of them, but it supports the feeling that "wow, NFT must be a hot thing, look, how many books are about it".

To understand, what NFT is really, watch this (technical knowledge does not required): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwMjPWOailQ&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes

Expand full comment

AI generated books? 🧐 cray

Expand full comment

There are templates and recipes to generate these non-fiction potboilers using jasper.ai. It's quite real and serious business.

Expand full comment

> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn’t enough for an in-depth post.

Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.

Expand full comment

facts.

Expand full comment
Oct 24, 2022·edited Oct 24, 2022

Also there are many children's dooles, they all look the same, and they are hardly scarce. If your child was famous, that doole would be worth millions. (These books are trash, however.)

Expand full comment

This is not (that) new as here is article from 2012 that around 100k books on Amazon can be attributed to single author with book-generator algorithm.

However, each pointing this out is a good approach, maybe we live in a time where we need a stamp "handmade" on book cover?

https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/

Expand full comment