This is crazy. It’s one thing for Amazon to be filled with AI nonsense books but it’s quite another for them to have a real author’s name attached to them without their knowledge.
Because they have been around long enough that small niche businesses closed, and you can’t get what you need locally, so you go through Amazon or another website that wants to charge 20 bucks shipping on a 6 dollar item.
Sort of. Mostly this is just what happens when you build a platform that allows basically anyone to sell something on it. Local businesses have limited space, so necessarily they needed to limit product to trusted brands/partners/publishers.
Amazon has actually made it possible for self publishing to exist. There are a lot of successful authors now that never would have made it in the old ‘local bookstore buys books from publishing house’ paradigm.
But this of course has also opened the floodgates for scammers which utilize those same indie-friendly options to try to exploit people.
I think the issues are a little more nuanced than just ‘local business good, Amazon bad’. Not that I think Amazon is good, I just think there are real, valid reasons why small bookstores (and their large book publishers) had problems.
I was thinking more general of Amazon as in products it sells, rather than only books. Book stores here have been damaged by Chapters/Indigo chains opening up.
I’m really glad he’s using his voice and platform to talk about this. He’s right, it is a huge escalation and an attempt to control. Usually, if a kid feels a book isn’t for them….they generally just put it back and and stop reading it. I did that dozens of times as a teen. This weird distortion of the concept of appropriateness to prevent young people from being able to see themselves in literature or learn about certain topics is so transparent and it’s scary to see it gaining so much traction.
The Libby app connects with a lot of libraries. There are a few others that are library specific such as cloudreaders, hoopla, and kanopy. If you have a library card, try checking your library’s website for a digital collection or elibrary. Depending on where you live you may have access to more library cards as well. I have one for the county library that uses Libby and one for the public library that uses cloudreaders.
“Alice closed her eyes and sighed, savoring the moment before reality came back crashing down on them like the weight of an elephant sitting on them both while being eaten by a shark in an airplane full of ninjas puking out their eyes and blood for no apparent reason other than that they were ninjas who liked puke so much they couldn’t help themselves from spewing it out of their orifices at every opportunity.”
“Wilson has admitted that she would not write one of her books, published in 2005, today.
Love Lessons is about a 14-year-old girl, Prue, who falls in love with an art teacher who partly reciprocates. They kiss and he admits that he loves her, too.
Wilson told the Guardian in a recent interview: “It’s so different now …”
😐 That was no more appropriate in 2005 than it is now you moron! We aren’t talking 150 years ago… that was 18 years ago!
In other words, it was eight years AFTER Mary Kay LeTourneau pled guilty to that shit…
There have been a lot of articles in press about TikTok being responsible for the rise of interest in literature by young people, as the article also mentions.
At the end, it probably was either a planted story, or memetic evolution triggered by one journalist noticing something in their environment that wasn’t a general trend.
I find it appalling that Amazon demanded evidence of a trademark registration for her name. I hope they get sued. Trademark or not, you can’t put an author’s name on something that they did not write. That’s called plagiarism, and it is not legal, especially if you try to make money off of it. I wonder how many authors they did this to? How clogged will the civil courts get from this? What a mess!
I’ll add that if you can’t find it on libgen, or if you’re looking for comics and manga ie things that might not be on there, FMHY is a great thing to google ;) includes audiobooks if you’d prefer that to reading. Includes direct downloads as well as torrents.
That said, depending on what you want to learn, there may be a youtube video on it. There’s tons on youtube for certain subjects like video editing or coding if that’s what you’re interested in.
Edit to add: if you’d rather buy a physical copy, ebay and AbeBooks are great sources.
Data is a concept the markets still haven't figured out. When something can be copied infinitely at no additional production cost it defies the economic nature of physical goods. Ten years ago in a business class the suggested adaption was providing data as a service through subscriptions and a lot of the market has moved in that direction. We absolutely hate that, though.
Art as a market commodity is also an interesting thing since we can't define art. The best we can do is create art for the purpose of motivating purchasing behavior. Some great art has been made like this, but most art industries are horrendously abusive to the producers of art who often have to rely on outside forces to market their work who also happen to have a much easier time making much more money than the artists themselves will ever see.
All this to say that the systems we have in place are inadequete to support artists appropriately to the value they contribute to society. I don't have a solution for anyone who wants to create art as their job. My personal solution is to make my work something else and produce my art only on my own terms. Supporting oneself as an artist in the market is a nightmare.
With the flood of AI content now published at Amazon, sometimes attributed to authors in a misleading or fraudulent manner, how can anyone reasonably expect working authors to spend every week for the rest of their lives policing this? And if authors don’t police it, they will certainly hear about it, from readers concerned about these garbage books, and from readers who credulously bought this crap and have complaints. Or authors might not hear any thing at all, and lose a potential reader forever.
I find this upsetting as a reader, I imagine these writers are absolutely horrified.
Serious question for the authors reading this - if there was a non-exclusive Fediverse e-commerce alternative to self-publishing on Amazon (including print on demand), would you use it?
Second question - what features would you like to see to make it fly? Dream big here - I'd love to hear all your ideas.
Third question - besides the topic of the article above, what does Amazon do wrong for authors? I've got a fair idea, but I really want to hear your thoughts and personal experiences.
Draft2Digital already exists as a way to publish everywhere except Amazon (and actually you can do Amazon through them too but then both take a cut). I’m not sure what the benefit would be for a publishing service to be connected to the fediverse.
Their contract terms for new authors are set in stone, atrocious even for the publishing industry, and unavoidable for most because they have a stranglehold on the ebookmarket.
Honestly one could go on and on and on about the shit they’ve pulled/tried to pull at various times.
Anyway… Why would the hypothetical e-publisher need to be on the fediverse?
To be honest right now that just seems like a recipe for getting no publicity and no sales, which no author who wants to actually have an income would do just to promote fediverse. There’d have to be an advantage beyond already existing platforms.
There isn’t a need for that at the moment. There are PLENTY of small publishers you can send a manuscript to. Small publishers will, of course, sell authors’ books on Amazon, but it’s absolutely not the same thing as going it on your own as an author dealing directly with Amazon. First of all, if you submit to and are accepted by a small publisher, libraries can purchase your book and there are none of the exclusive rights crap Amazon imposes on the individual writer looking for a venue. Most writers seek out a small publishing house before resorting to the “go it alone” approach. There are many writers who also avoid the Amazon bullshit by setting up their own publishing company just to publish their own works, which is perfectly simple to do and doesn’t cost much at all, in comparison to all the costs associated with marketing, cover art, bla bla bla. Amazon is often a last resort or a result of “the final straw” of receiving rejections from publishers and when writers don’t know how to set up their own mini publisher to self-publish first. Anyway, you can by-pass a lot of the Amazon crap by setting yourself up as a publisher that dedicates itself to publishing your writing. You can even offer paperbacks and hardcovers, using a printing service to take care of that for you. Then, through your own publishing company you set up, you offer your work to Amazon. It’s a different set of conditions.
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