Image description: The image shows a Kindle e-reader displaying a page of text, likely from a book, with a portion of the text visible in a non-English language. Overlaid on the image are two text boxes with stylized red backgrounds and white lettering. The top text box says, "To combat chatGPT generated books on the kindle store, Amazon only allows users to publish 3 books ~per day." The second text box sarcastically says, "You know, a totally normal human output," accompanied by a rolling eyes emoji. There is also a graphic of a skeletal hand with a pink hue pointing towards the text boxes, adding emphasis to the message being conveyed about the volume of publication and questioning its normalcy.
(Originally published on mastodon.social: 2024-02-23)
Just to play devils advocate, maybe there is a author out there who has a stockpile of unpublished books that he's publishing all at once. I mean it could happen.
What gets me though is that if they set the that high there had to have been people spamming AI "books" at a rate much greater than that.
Fair-ish, but at the same time I'm hard pressed to imagine how the still insane but also still more reasonable 1 a day would meaningfully put someone in a bind. It's going to take me a whole month to publish these 30 books I've been sitting on, my career as an author is ruined.
It's not uncommon for people who got their start on Wattpad and Royal Road to have 3+ novels of material to publish by the time they feel it's worth it. I suspect this is exactly why the limit was 3 per day tbh, so you can drop a trilogy all together.
That said, there should be daily, weekly, and monthly limits as well. Do something like 3/6/9 and 99% of people will be satisfied.
Publishing houses, maybe?
Makes sense, but I'd say that it'd be reasonable to make publishing houses verify their identity somehow to get higher limits. If your Amazon account is just a standard personal account, you don't need to publish that often.
Just playing devil's advocate, but that would require human interaction and support, and probably wouldn't be too hard to fake given there's little barrier to becoming a 'publishing house'. Also for little gain, since I don't see much difference between once a day and 3 times a day
If you are a large publisher like Random or Penguin, you not only get human interaction but you probably have a dedicated team of reps for support and contact. Of course they get exceptions, it makes Amazon money. (And I’m not even mad, that’s not even scummy from a business perspective)
Little unknowns dont get this treatment until they prove themselves.
I wonder how long it would take for the total number of books written by AI to be bigger than the total number of books ever written by humans.
You could outwrite all of humanity with a laptop pretty easily. Getting published is the trick.
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