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