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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

#121

Post by phatfish »

Animats wrote: post #80
CSMastermind wrote: post #67

> 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.

Right. After I got a recall notice on some Amazon vitamins because they were counterfeit, I stopped ordering much of anything from Amazon. A competing "direct from the manufacturer" sales site would be useful. Only the business that actually makes the thing could sell it. No intermediaries.

I find good deals on manufacture online stores, so that would be helpful.

It started from using Amazon to research and then looking for alternative larger online stores to buy from when product+shipping more or less matched Amazon.

A couple of times I have found good deals direct from the manufacture that were not available elsewhere, so I make a point of checking there as well now.

It feels like companies are able to setup a competent online store more easily now (billing and logistics).

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

#122

Post by bambax »

mkl wrote: post #117
bambax wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> The second most prolific fiction writer is Charles Hamilton, 1876-1961. It is basically impossible to count his books but he is known to have written more than 100 million words, which is the equivalent of 1,200 full length novels He also wrote about 5000 short stories.

Of course there will be outliers in any category, but even then... 100 million words divided by 60 years of activity (?) is 1.6 million words a year, every single year of that period. I don't think that's possible for just one man.

But ghostwriting is as old as writing.

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

#123

Post by roryirvine »

sph wrote: post #115
kredd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It only launched in the UK a year ago, but is now the "UK's most-downloaded shopping app" according to The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/consumer-rights/what...

Sure, not all of those downloads will have resulted in a purchase - but the same is true of Amazon.

The point is that Temu is takes the "masses of cheap crap" aspect of Amazon, and makes a virtue of it. It's effectively the Ryanair model - most people want cheap crap, so why bother with the last vestiges of Amazon-style customer service when you can ditch all that and be even cheaper and crappier?

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

#124

Post by dwighttk »

bambax wrote: post #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…

>because humans can tell the difference; why can't machines

Because human intelligence is non-computable

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

#125

Post by kredd »

sph wrote: post #115
kredd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, fair. I’ve never used it to be honest, but from what I’ve heard from my friends it’s good at “cheap crap that I need” category. My point wasn’t advertising it to someone, but saying even the giants like Amazon could see its lunch being chipped away slowly if they don’t fix their issues. That being said, I won’t be surprising once the competition starts heating up, they’ll start banning other Chinese tech companies in US.

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

#127

Post by chrisjj »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #5

The focus of the article is on charlatans selling courses, but I think Amazon deserves more scrutiny. They enable this entire ecosystem of fake books and fake products. I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.

> The focus of the article is on charlatans selling courses

... with no evidence of charlatanism, note.

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

#128

Post by hnbad »

whyenot wrote: post #65
protocolture wrote: post #61

The biggest issue is how Amazon fails to police its genre categorisations. The advice from the guys making garbage books, which they quite obviously put into practice, is to apply for genres with low book counts to more easily get a best seller badge for that category. Which makes Amazon a war to get miscategorised.

I'd argue an even bigger issue is the way Amazon clogs up its search and product listings with sponsored results. Amazon isn't interested in selling you what you are looking for. They want you to buy some sponsored junk instead. This mindset permeates the site and IMO is the source of many current problems.

I remember a time when Amazon was a first class reference example for facetted search. These days I find it hard to set any meaningful filters on most of my searches. Even common ones like color and size are often absent. I guess there is no ROI in helping you find the specific thing you're searching for when you can instead spray and pray with "sponsored results" and keyword stuffing.

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

#129

Post by Free-is-Freedom »

jhbadger wrote: post #118
CSMastermind wrote: post #67

> 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).

Here's the secret: Aliexpress is actually very good. If you can find an offering where the materials and processes are detailed AND the price reflects these details THEN you can get excellent value and items that last.

Buying without meeting these conditions will only yield garbage and scams.

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