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Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

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Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#111

Not just e-books, garbage print too! Link below. The kid likes brain teasers, so I'll grab a book here and there. The last one I ordered was seemingly AI generated. The wording was off, the answers were either completely incorrect, or theoretically correct but not matching the question or parameters asked. I can't quite remember the last time I became as infuriated at a...book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CQQPPQ…

The image cover is visibly AI-generated. I find AI images are easier to spot than AI text.

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#112

> Amazon is filled with garbage Full stop, no need to specify e-books. I've moved my purchasing dollars elsewhere at this point with the exception of some very specific categories. Amazon is just too unreliable.

The problem is that unless you buy Brand stuff, you're just paying double the price for being dropshitted Aliexpress garbage.

Yes, that was a typo but I'm leaving it.

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highlights include: - "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 - "Line Goes Up" (2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g - "The Future is a Dead Mall" (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

`Line Goes Up` was jaw-droppingly awesome, about the Venn diagram of crypto and scammers being (maybe) a circle :)

Another great resource for crypto news is Molly White's website:

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

What's amazing to me is reading about what the crypto thieves and smart contract exploiters do with the funds they've taken. It seems common for a person who's managed to acquire $100K USD worth of ETH or Solana to then turn around and buy some NFTs with it.

I'm like: "Dude, you just had a great payday, now you get to ride off into the sunset with your ill-gotten gains." But either they are crazy, the world is crazy, or I'm going crazy. I don't understand it all.

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#114
post #92
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works until people look at things like Temu, and figure out “why should I get from Amazon, when I can buy something for the same quality”. It’s just a battle of giants.

Who? There's your problem. I have never heard of Temu, and neither have many who know (and use) Amazon.

If you believe their stats, they have 70M+ active users in US, so I’m assuming you’re just not their target customer.

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#115
post #114
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? There's your problem. I have never heard of Temu, and neither have many who know (and use) Amazon.

If you believe their stats, they have 70M+ active users in US, so I’m assuming you’re just not their target customer.

Not everybody lives in the US. Stats indicate that 53% of Temu users are from the US, and 7.5% are from the UK where I live.

Thanks for advertising it to me, but it might be futile. After having had my experience with the Amazon shopping giant, and how it fell from grace, I do not care to "invest" in another giant that will eventually end the same way.

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Financial Advice (2023) is also excellent - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA Its about the fallout of the memestock craze and where the community ends up.

So I thought I had known most of that material, but I had somehow missed the entire thing about the mother-of-all-short-squeezes being a global financial apocalypse that brings down the entire system... Which actually raises the interesting question: just how can you even entertain a belief that you'd somehow leverage billion-dollar profits in such a situation? I mean, I know it's completely divorced from reality. I…

I know what you mean, but we both know the how. The "I will be rich by the end of it" square is fixed, the route taken to that square will go by any path just barely plausible. If you point out one is impossible - that the Big Them will screw them over - well, the Bigger They In The Shadows will force them to follow The Secret Rules. Yeah, you and I wouldn't entertain this, but if one fixes the desired ending, then the contortions in the middle don't matter as much. "if not like this, then it will be that".

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#117
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's 'solution' has been to limit self published authors to 3 new books a day. What a joke. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restric...

Yes, that number is absurd. A normal person can maybe write a book a year, max. Stephen King can write two , but there's only one of him. Maybe simple self-help books can be written a little faster, because they are shorter. A maximum set in words -- instead of books -- might work better; say 100-150k words per year? But would that be enough? Wouldn't grifters create a multitude of accounts to publish their books? Ma…

3 per day is absurd, but so is a maximum of one book a year. Here are some people who beat that by miles: https://thebookslist.com/most-prolific-authors/

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#118

> Amazon is filled with garbage Full stop, no need to specify e-books. I've moved my purchasing dollars elsewhere at this point with the exception of some very specific categories. Amazon is just too unreliable.

> Amazon is filled with garbage. Full stop, no need to specify e-books.

But the problem is where else can you buy things online where this isn't a problem these days? Everywhere has become a marketplace akin to Alibaba (where people traditionally accepted the tradeoff of poor reliability in exchange for good prices when decent products were actually delivered).

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#119
A little OT -- about using AI for writing.

I wrote a book in 2021 -- a historical novel (in French) -- that I published on Amazon and that did reasonably well and was even selected as one of the five "Amazon Storyteller" for France that year (it didn't win though).

I wrote that book with zero AI, and it was very hard work. It was also not particularly enjoyable, and at times excruciating.

Now I'm writing a second one, also a novel, but using AI tools. AIs don't write the book: I discuss scene beats and plot twists with different models. It's mostly moral support -- something an old-fashioned, experienced editor that had infinite time on their hands might have done.

(Of course I did try to have models do the writing, but the output is usually very poor. I'm surprised that automated ways to detect AI writing don't work, because humans can tell the difference; why can't machines?)

Using AI as a partner/editor transforms the process of writing completely, and makes it actually pleasurable. Now I long for going back to work instead of dreading it.

Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

#120

Stick to checking out books from your library / Libby. You'll save money and might end up making discoveries you otherwise wouldn't.

I saw a couple of scammy AI looking "summary of " title in the search results of Libby recently.

Hopefully just a temporary glitch, but there's a hard problem of being a gatekeeper and saying "No, that's not a real book".

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