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Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

Would "bestseller" be influenced by people grabbing this BookSpam through Kindle Unlimited? It looks like the bulk of the Kindle best sellers[1] are available through unlimited, and I have to think Amazon counts that as equivalent to a sale, even though it would largely be people who grab low grade junk like this that they would never have paid for traditionally.

So are people dumping this junk to yield royalty payments through the Kindle Unlimited program? How does that work? Minutes read? Do you get paid just because some person downloaded something via the program, and if so how much? Time to fire up the text generator.

[1] - https://www.amazon.ca/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digital...

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> How does that work? Minutes read?

It's based on the number of words read, not minutes.

It can't be pure junk, or people wouldn't be reading enough of it to make it climb the charts.

Ah, okay that is interesting.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130

I don't think this "book" filled the pages with loren ipsum, but it is entirely possible that they fed all of the available news stories into a language model such that someone actually sat there page flipping through chapters of decorated text.

But ultimately I think there is a stark difference between someone who actually paid $7 for an ebook, and someone who downloaded something on Kindle Unlimited and flipped through it. I am curious how KU influences the best seller charts numerically, which I can't find a clarification of.

How hard would it be to write a script that downloads books and "reads" them -- i.e. exercises the Kindle app (say on a desktop-alike) -- giving Amazon plausible excuse to say "n words read"?

Point being: if there's a way to game a system, people will game that system.

> giving Amazon plausible excuse to say "n words read"?

Amazon wouldn't do that because that would cost them more money (the payout to authors is based on that).

The authors would have an incentive to do that, but Amazon does their best to prevent it (again, because it costs them money).

I suspect that anything that rises to the best-seller level gets examined by Amazon very closely.

> I suspect that anything that rises to the best-seller level gets examined by Amazon very closely.

I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Amazon cares.

See their physical goods store: it’s also a race to the bottom with zero oversight whatsoever (commingling, counterfeits, used/returned/dirty items sold as new…) I don’t see why the virtual books store would be any different.

Amazon wrote the proverbial book on enshitification/race to the bottom :(

> I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Amazon cares.

They care because every fake Kindle Unlimited read comes out of Amazon's pocket. Directly.

That's entirely different from the situation with counterfeit merchandise, where Amazon gets its cut anyway.

That's assuming it is actual people reading it, and not just click fraud. Amazon has been battling that for years, books filled with literal gibberish reach the top few hundred titles in a category and the only reasonable explanation is that some group(s) are gaming the system by buying/phishing Kindle Unlimited subscriptions then skimming through their own "books" to turn a profit.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7b774/ai-generated-books-of...

Using LLMs to make the books vaguely coherent instead of meaningless word salad adds a layer of plausible deniability which might make Amazon slower to notice what's going on.

It seems like a kind of strange strategy for click fraud. A KU subscription is $10, Amazon takes a 30% cut, and for $700 a month you would need 100 KU bots with unique accounts and payment info.

What does 100 stolen credit card numbers cost?

"Seller" definitely seems to be a misnomer here. That said, I'm not so sure it's out of line with publisher tradition as units shipped is often used to hype (alleged) demand. The music industry had the same problem (along with payola).

The more things stay the same, the more we really don't change.

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