Amazon Is Filled With Garbage Ebooks. Here’s How They Get Made.
17th April 2024
Take, for example, when tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book came out this February. A host of other books hit the Kindle store along with it. They all had bizarre, SEO-streamlined titles, like those new businesses that are named Plumbing Near Me to game the Google algorithm.
If you do stuff by algorithm, it can be gamed. God forbid you should actually, you know, have real people doing the work for you. (Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Dat.)
“I found ‘Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy,’ by a ‘guy’ who ‘wrote’ four biographies this month,” said Ben Smith when he interviewed Swisher for Semaforum.
Swisher was less than flattered by the biographies. “I wrote [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy and I said, ‘You’re stealing my IP! What is going on?’” she told Smith. (Disclosure: Swisher works for Vox Media.)
And that’s the key. If it had been something by, say, Alex Jones, or Andrew Tate, would they be so upset? I think not. (Unmentioned: That Vox is a Voice of the Crust–one of the worst–and full of ‘garbage pseudo-journalism’.)
Note that Amazon was NOT ‘stealing her IP’. The books complained about were entirely different from Swisher’s book; you would think that a professional writer would spend the effort to learn the basics of copyright law. (Not to mention the fact that ‘intellectual property’ is to actual property as ‘gay marriage’ is to actual marriage.)
Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.
And, most importantly, dilute the impact of her book, which promotes the Woke agenda under the guise of being about tech.
All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.
Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.
In other words, Amazon has to step up and compensate (at great expense) for the fact that people are unwilling to act like adults and do some due diligence. These kids today….