Montaigne (1533-1592) famously said il y devroit avoir quelque coerction des loix contre les escrivains ineptes et inutiles ("there should be laws against stupid and useless writers").
This was about just a hundred years after the invention of the printing press.
So I searched on Google Books and limited the timeline... What I found were the pretentious ramblings of an old man that thought way too highly of himself for getting lucky at a time that a little luck could make you a fortune to last a lifetime. He wrote a bunch of books on the market. It was like 1910s or something. They were so worthless, but I did find them hilarious to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Opera...
So, considering a very simple formula could have been so effective, I wondered what they'd find at the library and if even that simple concept would have been available. What wouldn't be available is SEC data. But, as your second suggestion made clear, you could get the information for ratings agencies.
Just like existence of email didn't create the concept of spam, it just made sending it much, much, cheaper.
It's also worth mentioning that this problem isn't limited to ebooks. There's also a cottage industry of mass produced minimal-effort audiobooks on Audible as part of various "passive income" scams. Dan Olson made a pretty good video essay[1] about one such scam where he actually played along for most of it and also gave it a try as a ghostwriter.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
EDIT: Considering the most cited examples are Amazon/Kindle and Audible, I think parallels can also be drawn to the proliferation of no-name brand Chinese whitelabel dropshipping products on regular Amazon. Everyone already knows not to trust Amazon reviews but at this point it's hard to find reputable brands for products you're not already familiar with (e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?). LLMs will definitely make reviews even more untrustworthy but they might also help generating even more plausible copycat product descriptions and designs.
Ye this one is annoying. I often look for automotive tools and before I realized this I thought I was turning insane. Different store fronts pretend they are making some tool or like has sourced a factory to do their design.
But they like order the tool with a sticker and paint job from the same supplier.
Sometimes nuts and bolts or like cover plates vary but it is the same base.
I was browsing for tool hooks for the garage the other day and it felt like there are two factories in China that make hooks and two factories that put rubber on them for 4 combinations and that is it. But 20 flavours of branding.
Edit: It would be really neat if the factory had to mark everything they made.
I think there is some truth to this in that it's likely profitable to flood the market with mediocre products (especially if you do it through a white label network of "competing" brands) as long as you can avoid refunds (and on Amazon certain sellers make returns intentionally difficult by providing Chinese addresses without a prepaid label, making you pay more for the return shipping than you likely paid for the product to begin with). This also drives down the overall expectation of quality and reduces market pressures for quality while also completely swamping any competitor trying to sell a genuinely high quality product by making reviews completely unreliable.
I don't think this is a coordinated strategy as with whitelabel dropshipping being sold as a get-rich-quick-scheme for years there's no real need for it. Plus as you mention in many cases this is simply a consequence of a race to the bottom earlier in the supply chain resulting in nearly identical mediocre products even when some parts differ.
Personally I've run into this when picking out interior doors for our new house: despite being in the mid-tier price range, various aspects ranging from the veneer to the locks are extremely underwhelming but apparently on par with other doors in that price range. There's literally no reason the locks should feel like cheap plastic toys but it's something that's not visible and can't usually be tested even in a show room so apparently that's where they decide to cut corners. And because even standard sizes are considered custom, there's no way to return them, let alone once installed.
> I think there is some truth to this in that it's likely profitable to flood the market with mediocre products
I think a factor here could be that you don't want the customers to recognize bad products? Some appliance models rotate so fast there are hardly any (non fake) review consensus on them. It is not just no-name Alibaba, but "proper" brands to, that seem to do that.
“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.
“First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. [...] And in time there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality.”With modern things, we don't yet know what will remain relevant and what will fade into obscurity or lose its relevance.
I read mostly books written before the World Wars and I’m doubtful there’s much after that period of any real and lasting value. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy some of it, of course, mostly the fiction. The exception might be really niche works of local history, which is probably <0.001% of all such books, or a few really good scientific/mathematical compendiums.
I do think, as time goes on, and things are declassified, we'll learn more about e.g., the Iraq War than we know now. To a point, things become clearer with distance, which often renders books written on contemporary subjects outdated. But a book published today could be a decent summary of events for people who didn't live through them, or were too young to pay attention at the time. Unfortunately, one recent why I don't pay them too much mind is that most of the genre is hopelessly partisan, one way or another, and I don't know that there are any really great historians to write something timeless. But either way, I would say the insights you can glean from those books are still readily available if you're watching events critically today. Not much has changed, and if it has, it was usually for the worst. Maybe the most interesting part for many people would be the reminder that many of the same people directly responsible for those disasters are still considered respectable people today and help drive policy. E.g., Bill Kristol didn't go into some kind of exile - he's still considered a very serious person and has a lot of influence and is out there shilling the same type of thinking in a different context.
Crashed, by Adam Tooze was a very very good retelling of the GFC, and I did read all the newspapers at the time and still found lots of interesting stuff.
More generally, I'd argue that modern historians probably have the highest chance of producing useful new insights recently.
If you accept fiction (and like fantasy fiction), I'd argue that the Malazan books of the fallen and/or the Nine Worlds series are serious works that are going to endure. Ask me again in a century, though ;)
I think people still write good books which can provide good insights into the human condition, it's just hard to find them in the present.
It means books get written now which explore perspectives and voices unheard before, which in turn can help us readers expand our frame of reference.
The collective works of fiction written before 1900 tend to reflect the societal viewpoints of well-off white men (even when written by women or specifically dealing with societal ills). Go a few decades beyond that and you see authors from a working class background join the chorus, then more women, a broadening of sexual themes reflecting society's change (feminism, sexual liberation, homosexuality, etc.), more open criticism of religion too. Digital technology changed society significantly, and this is of course reflected in writing from the more recent decades, and coming up towards today you see more and more diversity amongst authors, adding — through the characters and narratives they create — yet more perspectives and insights. Sometimes pushing the envelope of a specific field, sometimes getting rid of tropes which no longer convince. Fiction changes constantly and will always be rooted in the year it was written.
You sell yourself short if you stop at 1940.
Two Americans today, whatever their sex and race, have virtually everything in common with each other compared to anybody from 1800, let alone 800. The extreme, excessive focus on race and sex in contemporary writing is exactly what makes it boring and irrelevant. This comment is a great example - you've been taught by contemporary writing that such a tendency existed, when it in fact excludes the objective reality of the tons of works that could not have been said to be "written" or "about" such people even by modern framing, but also the fact that "well-off white man" is a completely meaningless and inapplicable phrase if you go back more than a couple centuries.
The sort of work you're describing is the stuff we're taught to acculturate us to the world we already live in. There's no point browbeating me with even more material that I am already steeped in.
Define "virtually everything"?
The rich, white, and men have had massively different resources and societal privileges in each of those eras.
Even today it seems obvious to me that to be rich or white or male each brings benefits at every stage of life which can drastically change ones life experience: food security, personal safety, education, job prospects, and romantic opportunities.
“White” is a modern social abstraction that rapidly breaks down the further back you try to apply it. It also carries with it loaded assumptions that do not really hold even at a population level in different places. This is exactly what I mean: immersing yourself in modern culture blinds you to the reality people did not and could not apply such categories because they did not even exist. People often repeat that race is a social construct but rarely think about what that really means.
People in past cultures were totally alien. There’s some substrate of common humanity but trying to say, apply modern racial privilege politics to Xenophon’s encounter with the very pale Paphlagonians, or the widespread trafficking of European slaves even into modernity in Northern Africa and Anatolia, or even into parts of colonial America is just nonsensical.
I mean, take this quote from Benjamin Franklin for example, which would have been early in the conception of modern race:
> Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.
This is a completely bizarre Martian take to any of us alive today. The past was a foreign country. If you just stamp your feet and repeat “all old books is just rich white men” you’re not only completely wrong but missing genuinely different perspectives.
As an aside, what does it mean to not have a reasonably good understanding, as a man, of a woman’s perspective in 2024? Did you have mother, sisters, or cousins? No friends or girlfriend or wife? No empathy? As a last resort never read mumsnet or 2X? Ignoring the fact that once again highlighting the sex differences ignores the fact there are literally four billion women and they all have different perspectives, they’re not a hive mind, if you have to read a book to figure out the common differences in perspective…hasn’t something really gone wrong in society for that to even be possible? And could a book by some woman you don’t know and had some kind of connections or very unique experience - she got published after all - really tell you more than having long and deep empathetic conversations with people you actually know?
Books are great because they’re a window into that we can never see for ourselves. Literally 50% of the people on Earth right now are a different sex. You can find out what they think right now with no effort. We don’t need the nth book on “what it’s like to be an X in America”, we all know, everyone is shouting it from the rooftops. I’d trade it all for more Sappho, and I’m a member of a minority group that could write my own What It’s Like to Be An X in America book.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/21995.Best_21st_Century_...
People have had interesting insights in that period - of course - but very few of them require anything longer than a sentence, and they are few and far between.
By the way, 2000 was chosen semi-arbitrarily, I would probably put the line much farther back.
Yes, I knew someone who was in "publish as remainder", that is publish at a high price then sell in bulk at a discount. Creating the books involved:
1. Think of a subject
2. Get some pictures
3. Find someone to write something which goes with the pictures
4. Repeat
There has always been a market for the undescerning.
"The Value Of Owning More Books Than You’ll Ever Read" - https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-bo...
Of course I understand physical books can also be written by AI (just last week, I saw a physical poetry book fully written by AI, except for the preface). But it is much more cost to produce a physical book than throwing up something online only.
I spam this fact whenever someone makes arguments against piracy. I am utterly fine if no new culture is produced, as there already exists more than I could ever enjoy. Besides, creatives will create (with lowered production values) regardless of money. It’s a primal drive for them.
Although, I would be a little upset if they stopped making high-budget binge-worthy series.
Then again... What the hell do I care if it's made by AI? Especially if they use one of those preference-based RLHF and penalize the model against episodes where the series lost all its viewers.
I'm personally split on this viewpoint. Through a series of events this year (starting with the death of Charlie Munger), I've started reading the Harvard Classics. Doing the 15 minutes a day challenge, which started on New Year's Day. I bought the full original 1910 set on Ebay. They're pretty cheap because they're essentially just room decorum and probably nobody reads them. People on Ebay will gladly sell cool looking leather cover books because it makes their offices look nice. This is an actual descriptions many sellers use.
For me though, above all else it's been an incredibly humbling experience. Because its been a very long time since I've read works from genuine professionals who spent a lifetime mastering their craft. I'm struggling with prose and vocabulary. I'm not an avid reader. I will at most read maybe 5-10 books a month. Some of which are technical or industry related. But I still like hardcopies so I tend to visit bookstores. And the crushing reality is that what's generally available on bookshelves (at least in the USA) is fucking garbage. Half-assed ghostwritten autobiographies of no-name celebrities or politicians, lifestyle in-your-face FEMALE EMPOWERMENT books that give questionable advice, pseudo-historical nonfiction books, bland and uninspired Star Wars science fiction rip offs (and their accompanying video game expanded universe novels). The list goes on.
Barnes and Noble realized that their audience doesn't really buy physical books anymore (or just plainly don't fucking read) so have moved in to fill the gap that Toys R' Us left behind. Half the floor space is a glorified toy store. Most of the people that come here either bring their kids or are kids themselves hanging out in the Manga section.
The cliche is obviously here and repeating itself: but with each consecutive generation we become less literate. AI has made it so the illiterate get nifty summaries of other less literate summaries of great works and ideas, which then get challenged by the pseudo-intellectual hack frauds extracting wealth from their fanbase and college students pumping out bullshit papers to meet graduation requirements. Just how fucking low exactly can we limbo before it's too late? In this context AI is basically Accelerationism
Performances and storytelling was pretty much ephemeral before printing presses, records, and now computers. Now it’s cumulative. All the writing and art of the past several hundred years is out there.
Kind of creates an overproduction / saturation problem.
Why is this? due to legal reasons?