The Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski keeps tabs on coverage of her authors and their books with Google Alerts. And for years, she’s been getting regular notifications of sales of new e-books and essaysthose books. Readers scheming to get rich quick have long flooded Amazon and Google results with summaries and analyses, in some cases fooling readers into buying them instead of the real thing.
Summaries and study guides routinely pop up in bestsellers’ Amazon search results. More recently, some users appear to be harnessing generative artificial intelligence models – those robots Rice speaks of – to write whole books under the names of established authors to make a few bucks.Publishing 101, believes happened to her this summer. At the start of August, a reader e-mailed the author saying she’d found five or six books on Amazon under her name that looked suspicious.
Book distributors and sites such as Amazon, Friedman says, need to set up guardrails to protect authors’ authentic works.