Image description: The image shows a Kindle e-reader displaying a page of text, likely from a book, with a portion of the text visible in a non-English language. Overlaid on the image are two text boxes with stylized red backgrounds and white lettering. The top text box says, "To combat chatGPT generated books on the kindle store, Amazon only allows users to publish 3 books ~per day." The second text box sarcastically says, "You know, a totally normal human output," accompanied by a rolling eyes emoji. There is also a graphic of a skeletal hand with a pink hue pointing towards the text boxes, adding emphasis to the message being conveyed about the volume of publication and questioning its normalcy.
(Originally published on mastodon.social: 2024-02-23)
Fair-ish, but at the same time I’m hard pressed to imagine how the still insane but also still more reasonable 1 a day would meaningfully put someone in a bind. It’s going to take me a whole month to publish these 30 books I’ve been sitting on, my career as an author is ruined.
It’s not uncommon for people who got their start on Wattpad and Royal Road to have 3+ novels of material to publish by the time they feel it’s worth it. I suspect this is exactly why the limit was 3 per day tbh, so you can drop a trilogy all together.
That said, there should be daily, weekly, and monthly limits as well. Do something like 3/6/9 and 99% of people will be satisfied.
Publishing houses, maybe?
Makes sense, but I’d say that it’d be reasonable to make publishing houses verify their identity somehow to get higher limits. If your Amazon account is just a standard personal account, you don’t need to publish that often.
Just playing devil’s advocate, but that would require human interaction and support, and probably wouldn’t be too hard to fake given there’s little barrier to becoming a ‘publishing house’. Also for little gain, since I don’t see much difference between once a day and 3 times a day
If you are a large publisher like Random or Penguin, you not only get human interaction but you probably have a dedicated team of reps for support and contact. Of course they get exceptions, it makes Amazon money. (And I’m not even mad, that’s not even scummy from a business perspective)
Little unknowns dont get this treatment until they prove themselves.
Yeah this is exactly the reason. A fake publishing house using AI would be trying to publish under their one name anyway.
If they made fake accounts as fake authors then they could be identified by their banking info anyway.
It would be so costly and risky to set up enough bank accounts under assumed names in order to collect a profit from spraying junk across Amazon that it probably wouldn’t be attempted more than a handful of times.
Major, reputable publishers will, of course, have “enterprise” accounts with exceptions to the rule applied.
I thought people who read books were smart, where the hell was the two seconds of critical thinking it would have taken to realize this? Was this meme a desperate attempt to sway public opinion against Amazon’s supposedly unreasonable and oppressive policy?