I'm not a fan of buying ebooks. To be perfectly honest, I will never get an ebook unless it's free or I don't have access to a physical copy of the book because it has limited copies. I would much rather spend my money on a secondhand book, which may have tattered edges, browning pages, or a creasing spine, than have a digital copy.
I only realized today how incredibly prevalent garbage ebooks are on Amazon. I have known about online publishers who mass-produce books on particular subjects filled with clichés, platitudes, and generalized information that I can find just by typing a question on Google's search bar. Basically, these are books made at low cost, and inundated with scraped keywords guaranteed to work effectively on Amazon's algorithm to get the books recommended on the first page.
This system is further aggravated and made even more efficient due to the emergence of AI tools. With it, anybody can write hundreds of pages for a manuscript within days or even within hours. That's how powerful the AI has become, but if you've actually read what AI writes, it's stale. Boring. No human touch whatsoever. It's as if you're reading a novel that's structured as an academic or scientific paper.
Now, don't get me wrong. The output that AI produces is actually passable, and that's why a lot of these garbage ebooks can sell. There are other factors that contribute to their popularity, however. One of which is based on something that had existed before AI even came into the scene: review swapping.
If anybody wants to have more people buy their books, then one of the best ways to game Amazon's system is by hijacking the reviews. That is, if you can pay people to publish five-star reviews on your book, then, Amazon's algorithm will more likely recommend your book to others or put it on their first page.
Before, if these ebook publishers wanted to make a quick buck, they simply search the most popular keywords, and have an army of ghostwriters writing manuscripts for them. Once they are published, they have another group of review swappers who would exchange five-star ratings with each other. And they can just sit back, and watch the stream of passive income flow into their pockets.
This is one of the reasons why Amazon had to tighten their regulations on their publishing arm. They banned some accounts that were violating their guidelines on content, and they placed a limit on the number of ebooks an account can publish.
Still, the grifters have already dug their roots and have expanded their base on this pyramid. If you want to read the more detailed account of how these started, Vox's article goes into a succinct but informative story on Big Luca and the Mikkelsens.
But the point is this. Amazon's system has incentivized this kind of shady practice to run rampant on their platform because they prioritize lower costs with higher volumes, which helps in maximizing their profits, to the detriment of the poor consumers.
Unless you're someone who does an initial research on the books that you want to buy, and scrupulously checks the authenticity of reviews on Amazon, and perhaps even go so far as make comparisons between the retailers, then you might just get swallowed up by the system, and find yourself purchasing an incredibly trashy ebook for $0.99.
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