Technology

The two communities I'm most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my "fun" book recommendations from those subs.

I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I'm not really interested in sitting in a chat room.

So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn't be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I'd be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it's a possibility that even that job isn't safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.

I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing "literary" stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing...

I think you've misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.

This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can't deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.

They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.

The books aren't 'word salad' so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren't word salad, they just aren't human.

This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.

I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn't feel like a good omen for my children.

Some large percentage of Amazon is just significantly marked up stuff you can get more direct via Temu or eBay. I never thought Amazon would reinvigorate Best Buy but if you want actual brand nane stuff, you have to go there. I also never thought it would be hard to discover actual brands online, but it is now.

The kindle eink reader is amazing and absolutely great. However I don’t use KU and rarely buy books on it. I mainly use my library and read the borrowed books on it. As a piece of hardware it’s one of the few Amazon builds well. I’m surprised too.

There's even a federated alternative, BookWyrm!

...I guess these days the Fediverse is my hammer of choice, and every problem with the internet is a nail.