Today, Explained - Amazon’s garbage book factory

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Vox senior correspondent Constance Grady went inside the seedy underbelly of online self-publishing and lived to tell the tale. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn with help from Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers with help from Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! vox.com/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Your dad's favorite author, Eric Larson, has a new page-turner. It's about the Civil War, and it's gotten a lot of press. Lincoln did something that I think politically was quite brilliant. He decided, OK... As with other Larson books, like The Devil in the White City or Thunderstruck, the title's campy, and it's kind of random. The Demon of Unrest. It's almost as if there is this demon afoot in the land,

and sometimes, frankly, it's a little hard to understand exactly why. What does that have to do with the civil—never mind. Point is, your dad isn't going to remember that title when he goes to buy the book on Kindle. He's probably just going to search for Eric Larson. And up will pop what you might call Eric Larson books. Titles such as Eric Larson Biography, Eric Larson Biography Book, and Eric Larson, the biography of a storyteller, all published in the first five months of this year. What is going on? Coming up on today explained a man, a plan, a scam, AI, and why your Kindle is full of garbage.

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gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You're listening to Today Explained. Constance, go ahead. Give me your full name and tell me what you do. My name's Constance Grady. I'm a senior correspondent covering culture for Vox. Have you heard that our colleague Kara Swisher wrote a book? I have heard. It's been the talk of the town. I actually read it. I really like it. It's a very good book. It's also a book that has a staggering amount of buzz.

In your piece, you write about this weird thing that's a very good book. It's also a book that has a staggering amount of buzz. In your piece, you write about this weird thing that happened with Kara's book. What went on exactly? Yeah. So around the same time that the book comes out, a bunch of other books with kind of similar titles start to show up on the Kindle store. You go to look up Kara Swisher, and there's 20 AI biographies written by me that aren't me, that are pictures of me, very femmy pictures of me. You go look for them. They're all kind of dancing around the phrase

Kara Swisher book, kind of the same way that a lot of stores that exist now are named things like plumbing near me. So they show up if you're searching for a plumber near you. So you're seeing titles like Kara Swisher book, how she became Silicon Valley's most influential journalist. That's not even interesting. And then this one, I feel like maybe someone spilled coffee on their computer. Kara Swisher, Silicon Valley's Bulldog, and Kara Swisher biography, Unraveling the Life and Legacy. Text Queen Bee with a sting, which I'm like, okay.

A lot of books that are not actually by Kara Swisher, but if you're just kind of quickly searching Kara Swisher books so you can click on your first result and get the book that you want to read. There's something that looks close enough that if you're in a hurry, you kind of might click them by accident. So on this AI thing, I did, I wrote the CEO of Amazon. I'm like, what up, dude? Like, and he's, and they're like, oh, we're going to take them down for you. And I'm like, I'm not talking about me. What about everybody else? That is great for her if she can get it. That's probably not the case if this is happening with other authors. So here's what's happening. The phrase Kara Swisher book is trending on the Kindle storefront

and keyword scrapers that exist to find trending search terms are delivering the phrase Kara Swisher book to what we might call garbage book generators. So these will be people who use a combination of AI and very, very cheap ghostwriters to generate as quickly and cheaply as possible a series of books that they can plausibly title under something that includes whatever keyword is trending and get very distracted people to sort of accidentally buy them. And that's how they make their money. What does it look like when these books, the trash books pop up? So the trash book is going to have a plausible enough title that if you're reading quickly, it'll look like what you're looking for. It'll have kind of a

cheap and weird looking cover, a lot of clip art and really shoddy Photoshop kind of smashed together. Often the cover is AI generated, but if you're just looking fast, it's all designed to be just good enough to get past any first sensors that you might have up. The cost is going to be way lower than the cost of the actual book, and a lot of times price is one of the only metrics that people are scanning. So if you're just looking for the cheapest possible way to get the book you want, this is a book that you can very easily end up clicking on without looking all that closely. You click buy book and it shows up on your Kindle. And it might take you a few pages to realize, wait, this is not the book by Kara Swisher that I wanted to read.

This is a series of biographical claims about Kara Swisher. And I'm not sure that's actually true, what they're saying about her. Kara Swisher is a power of nature in the realm of tech newscasting. So there are a few tells that you will get that this is not the book you're looking for. One is just that the narrator might be different, right? Kara Swisher writes her book in the first person. She is the person telling you this story. The biographies are third person.

For the north of 20 years, she's been Silicon Valley's most sharp writer, exposing the ascent and fall of realms. But there are also some tells that will show up in text that is generated by an AI or by a large language model. So one is that it tends to follow a pretty classic, like kind of five paragraph essay format. Sort of each sentence will have a topic sentence and then sort of three supporting ideas, which leads cleanly to the next, you'll sort of feel like you're reading a pretty okay eighth grade essay. Swisher has barbecued everybody from Elon Musk and Imprint Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg and Kim Kardashian, separating admissions, revealing contentions, and igniting basic discussions about the effect of innovation on our lives.

And you'll also start to notice that a lot of the things that it's very confidently asserting to you don't necessarily match up with your understanding of the way the world actually works. You'll start to notice the misinformation that AI has become known for. And this happens with audiobook versions, too. Thus, jump into the universe of Kara Swisher and get ready to be tested, informed, and engaged. You will love it. So the interesting thing here is the numbers, right? So Kara writes one book and then like three or four titles spring up around her one book. Do we have a sense of how often this is happening? And does it happen with every big book, every book that gets buzzed?

This is something that we're seeing more and more with the release of particularly buzzy books that are really taking off on Amazon that their keywords are trending. And it's something that we have seen become more common as generative AI gets cheaper and easier to use and more widely distributed. So it's come to my attention that all of these biographies about me have shown up on Amazon, I think today, which is really an exciting day for me because I'm not just releasing one book. This is the real book, my book that I wrote. I'm releasing like nine books. I tried a lot of things when I was reporting this story to figure out if there was a way to quantify the number of these garbage books that are coming out. I talked to the Authors Guild. I talked to a bunch of different authors. It seems as though

the only people in a position to quantify the amount of these books that are coming out is Amazon itself. And it is really not in Amazon's best interest to tell anyone how many of these books there are. What does this mean for consumers other than, you know, you really need to make sure that you have the real title? It means that buying a book becomes kind of walking through a field of landmines. You have to figure out what you're looking at and be really careful and make sure that you're not just throwing your money at a kind of book-shaped digital file that doesn't have anything inside it. It also means that we have to be really, really careful with what we're reading because there are kind of literal dangers that are also in place here.

I spoke to a man who worked for the New York Mycology Society, so this is about foraging for mushrooms. He had been finding all of these AI-generated foraging books on Amazon. Most of them had the exact same title, The Forager's Harvest Bible. What's worse, if you try to look up just The Forager's Harvest, which, by the way, is the real book, you still get inundated by these other titles. They were also full of misinformation. They showed mushrooms that didn't exist, mushrooms that looked like real mushrooms, but weren't really there. He was incredibly worried because he said, if you have even the slightest bit of wrong information about a wild mushroom that you're picking to eat, that can literally mean life or death. Which was so striking to me because it shows that, you know, the worst case scenario with a garbage e-book is you could literally die from it.

That's not great. Hmm. And what about Jeff Bezos? No, I'm kidding. What about Amazon? What about the people who are supposed to be in charge of the Kindle marketplace? Have they cracked down on this at all? Kindle has done a number of things in order to try to make it more difficult for you to publish these garbage books. They have started to require that if you're publishing something on Kindle Direct Publishing, you have to say whether or not your content is AI generated. There's only so many titles that you can publish in a day, which can prevent people,

you know, from just churning them out and churning them out and churning them out through AI generating machines. On the other hand, I have talked to people who found that Kindle is very reticent to take down garbage books after complaints from authors who feel that it's infringing on their IP, especially if those authors aren't, you know, well-connected for sure. Which also makes a certain amount of sense, right? Because Amazon does not have an incentive to take down a file that is selling well on their site. That is money that Amazon can use. They do have an incentive to try to keep this user-friendly. And to the extent that the Kindle store becomes so choked with garbage that users stop being interested in using it, that becomes a big problem for them. Who is behind all of the garbage books? So this is what I went digging to find out

and I found something kind of incredible. Oh, coming up next? Coming up next. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself.

So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame and because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.COM promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents, and they are ready with a battle-tested playbook.

The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times. And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. It's Today Explained. We're back with Constance Grady, senior culture correspondent for Vox. Okay, so Constance, you went into the seedy underbelly of how trash books get in the Kindle marketplace. Who are the people doing this? So this is really, really interesting once you get into it it there's a lot of characters in this story

one of the first characters that i want to introduce you to is a man who goes by big luca also sometimes luca de stephanie hi this is big luca. And it's a quarter past five here in Dubai. And I just woke up and I'm having a cup of coffee and I'm ready to work. And according to the legend, he is the one who holds the world record for making the most money using Kindle publishing in a single day. How do you actually go from zero to more than $8,000 a month in three months? How did you do it? And so I've gathered all my strategies in this package.

Big Luca is one of the first teachers of the garbage book grift who really makes it big. And the thing that sets his class apart from all the other classes in this ecosystem is that he gives his students access to a secret Facebook group where they can arrange to buy five-star reviews that will push their garbage books up Amazon's algorithm. Eventually, one of the people who takes Big Luca's class is a man named Christian Mickelson. He apparently found the class by Googling the phrase, how to make money online. He's a college student. He publishes an e-book titled, How to Be a 4.0 Student in College Like Me at Big Luca's Self-Publishing Revolution.

And apparently it does well enough that he pulls in his twin brother, Rasmus, and they start going to town. They are publishing trash book after trash book. They're about things like tantric sex. They're about keto. They're about crystals. They're about all of these kind of trashy, fad-y keywords.

Anything that they can kind of tram into a title that will attract someone's attention, that someone somewhere is reliably searching for. They come up with this innovation, which is they run their manuscripts through Google Translate and then they just sell the result as a foreign language edition. This bumps their income into six figures. It is also the thing that eventually gets Amazon to block their publishing account. Okay. All right. What's up, everybody? Welcome to our channel. We are the Mickelson Twins. My name is Christian. My name is Rasmus.

So they start their classes after Amazon blocks their publishing account. They're like, we can't sell these guides to keto tantric crystal sex anymore. We're going to start teaching other people how to do this instead. Welcome to this YouTube video where I'm going to be talking about how you can make $100,000 in one single day from your publishing business. What they advertise is they say that they will give you access to keyword scrapers so you know what kind of book to write. So with these, you do not need to narrate anything yourself. You do not need to write anything yourself.

You do not need to design any cover yourself. You do next to nothing when it comes to- They will show you how to use AI to generate an outline and then either use AI to generate a draft or they'll send it to a ghostwriter who will write the draft for you. The ghostwriting company, they work with charges less than one cent per word. It works out to $500 for a 30,000 word book. We've worked out an exclusive deal with our favorite ghostwriting company to provide you with the lowest ghostwriting prices humanly possible. It's the same deal normally only we can get because we're friends with the CEO. They say they'll promise how to introduce you to audiobook narrators who you can haggle down to a $20 flat fee.

They'll show you how to get those five-star ratings on Amazon. They'll kind of give you everything you need in order to just rake in this passive income goal. In other words, someone else does the work, but we get paid. That's how the whole model works. According to the people who I talked to who actually took this class, though, really what happens is you pay your $2,000 to get into the class, and then you get a bunch of one-on-one calls with someone who's called a coach who kind of just tells you, oh, you actually have to be taking the $8,000 class to get access to any of this stuff. And if you really want to be successful, you'll

quote unquote, invest in yourself and take the $8,000 class. And that's how you'll really get to passive income in the end. I personally decided to go through this process that they're talking about and which they sent me an email with a link to their free video. And then it asks for money in order to learn how they do this so-called simple thing. Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. Name any Burger King, McDonald's, Walmart job that actually have you pay it to get hired. And again, the people who've taken the Mickelson's classes, they're told, your name will not be on this, but don't worry about it. You'll be making money. Yes, that's right. The people who take this class are told they're going to produce a book. They don't have to write it. They will not put their name on it, but they should be proud that

they've made a book and they should be proud because they are going to get rich from it. Or I should say, they don't guarantee that you'll get wealthy from it, but they say there is a possibility that you can. And then they show a lot of screen caps of some of their students who have been successful in order to illustrate just how successful you could maybe be. Every bit of this is something I would fall for in a slightly different life. It's so convincing. I watched the sales pitch they have and about halfway through I was like hypnotized. I was like, am I stupid for never having done this? Like, is this the key to a successful life? How could I not have seen it before? It's sort of shockingly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this is actually a good idea, even when you know, first of all, that it's unethical, and second of all, that it's really not likely to actually work.

And it does, so it does raise this bigger question, which is all the spammy garbage books. Is this just a phenomenon of Big Luca and the Mickelsons? Or did other people pick up on it and they're like, no, no, no, we're jumping in too? Absolutely other people have picked up on this. There is a whole ecosystem of people who have run this grift and turned to the teaching grift and kept going. What I think is really striking about the Mickelson twins is they are not very interested in hiding what they are doing. They kind of operate in plain sight. That makes it easier to see how this all works economically speaking. I think it also makes it easier to see what the appeal is emotionally for the people who are doing it. You can kind of feel the tug of this idea that maybe

it could actually be this easy and you could publish a book and be super rich and you don't even have to write it. Yeah, I get that. I get that. Yeah, this is clearly a grift. You've said it a bunch of times, but is it illegal? What Christian and Rasmus are doing, as far as I can tell, is not illegal. A lot of it is unethical. A lot of it is against Amazon's terms of service. So things like buying reviews, that's something that if they can catch you, they'll kick you off their site. But none of it is really, you know, something that you can go to jail for. So we're going to see more of this, almost certainly, right? If nobody's going to jail. Yeah, there are not that many incentives to not do it if it's something that you're into. One of the things that really strikes me about this and kind of feels like a little bit of the tragedy of it to me is that what this grift does is exploit the part of us in our culture that thinks of books as valuable things, right? It exploits this belief that books are really meaningful and

writing a book is something to strive for and that reading a book is a good thing to do that will enrich your life. And in every case that it intersects with those ideas, it replaces a book that is real and is of some amount of value to you with just this book-shaped digital file filled with nonsense and misinformation. And I think that's really what we all stand to lose when this grift goes on.

That was Vox's Constance Grady. Kara Swisher's book, by the way, is called Burn Book. It's in stores now. Amanda Llewellyn produced today's show and Amina El-Sadi edited it. Rob Byers engineered and Laura Bullard fact-checked. The rest of our team includes Avishai Artsy, Victoria Chamberlain, Hadi Mouagdi, Halima Shah, Miles Bryan, Peter Ballin and Rosen. Welcome, Peter. Denise Guerra, Patrick Boyd, Andrea Christen's daughter. Welcome, Andrea. My co-host, Sean Ramos from Matthew Collette and executive producer Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox, which is totally free. Thanks in part to contributions from listeners like you.

Join us at Vox.com slash give. Thank you.