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Comment by PessimalDecimal | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed entire publishers on Amazon which are just fly-by-night AI slop, probably printed on-demand too.

For example, I stumbled on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4TKY58 and had never heard of the author. Their page (https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004LUETE8) suggested they were incredibly prolific in a huge number of areas which already felt off. No information about "Robert Johnson" was available either. The publisher, HiTeX Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=HiTeX+Press) has a few other authors with similarly generic names and no information available about them, each the author of numerous books spanning a huge array of topics.

It feels even more bewildering and disheartening to see AI slop come into the physical world like this.

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Give yourself a treat as a reader: stop going to Amazon.

There are lots of other ebook stores and physical book stores that don't enable scams, mistreat workers, or do this weird AI junk.

Yeah I really need to. I do occasionally go through a bout of trying to take my business elsewhere. I am sort of a used book junkie and Amazon still owns that market. Though I do often get my used books from Alibris when I can.

Recommendations for alternatives would be very welcome.

For mainstream books, I use Bookshop ( https://bookshop.org ) or Kobo. Bookshop supports indie bookstores. Both of them will let you know if a given eBook has DRM or not.

(Now, when a book does have DRM, I buy it from Kobo! I'll leave it to the reader to speculate why :) )

Do you have recs? Particularly where I can buy epub without drm with a fairly rich catalogue across niche and more mainstream writings?

Sadly KDP Select makes that impossible. Preferential rates for authors in exchange for exclusivity. There’s a lot of (human) slop there, but enough stuff I want to read.

I recently saw this, and technical subjects that actually have 0 books written about them now have entire pages filled with books. Title sound good, and the page look decently good, but there's something slightly off, and when you look at it the "author" has been writing a book a week...

It's disheartening because now I will look much more into reputable publishers, and so filter off independent writers who have nothing to do with this.

I do think that publishers will become more a point of trust in the post-LLM world as a result.

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