I could see that for a few reasons. Someone new to Amazon adding their entire library at once, an updated edition of a long running series, different language versions of the same book, etc. Probably not many (any?) legitimate authors writing 3 books a day, but there are lots of instances where an author might be trying to add several at once.
Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable to allow these legitimate upload waves though.
> Something like 60/month seems like it'd be a little more reasonable
That would cause scammers to create new accounts, upload 60 books, hope to sell a few on the first few days until they get caught, then rinse and repeat.
Amazon will probably also monitor accounts who upload 3 books a day using some heuristic so that they can stop it before it becomes an issue.
The notion of "book" is way fuzzier that it was in the olden days. There's nothing stopping an author from releasing one or two thousand words every as a single book, inside a larger story (basically having a book for what could have been single chapters ?)
Same way illustrators could publish their roughs and croquis as books, etc.
As those can be set with a 0$ price, and virtually no inventory issue, it feels like a practice that doesn't penalize either amazon, nor the author, nor the readers.
> There’s nothing stopping an author from releasing one or two thousand words every as a single book, inside a larger story (basically having a book for what could have been single chapters ?)
Amazon has a separate service within KDP for exactly that kind of serialization, [0] so while its true that KDP handles a wider range of books than just the novel-size works people seem to be thinking about, that particular example is probably an explicitly not-prioritized use case for regular “book” publishing on KDP.
Money laundering might be a thing, but I can't see how they could benefit from stolen credit cards. They have to refund when the card owner contacts their bank, don't they?
That assumes the cardholder actually realizes their card has been stolen. Many people may not notice an extra $50/month being siphoned from them, especially if they already use Amazon.
A 15 minute human review process that checks if it:
- is copy pasted from another source or the internet
- respects copyright
- is written in the language it says it is
In graduate school nobody can understand each other's papers, so the colleges set up a massive list of formatting guidelines. The idea being the focus on formatting means you at least had to spend a minimum amount of effort.
A 15-minute human review is not going to be able to check all three of those things, or really do much of a job on even either of the first two in isolation.
My friend wrote a children’s book using AI. Even without AI, it may be possible to make a few children’s books with the same characters in a single day. I’m curious though, who are the authors who have published 3 long form books per month?
Depends on your definition of what a book is. If you step outside of novels you have books that are mainly tables of facts, or get updated monthly, etc.
