More than 4.2 million books with ISBN numbers were published in the United States in 2025, according to data compiled by Bowker via Publishers Weekly. This total marks a 32.5% increase over 2024.
My wife is waiting for her check from the Anthropic settlement, since one of her books was in the pirated collection they used. Nothing from the books they “legally” copied, though.
I judge some categories for a contest for independently published books, and half the ones I get are total garbage. Not AI generated, I think, there is a specific category for those. And people have to pay to enter this, so I’d think the quality is better than average for the market.
As for the apps, even if they are not bad per se, they are stuff for which there are already tons of examples. Why do a market survey if you generate your app for almost nothing? Though I wonder how much testing is done on these.
I don’t know the economics of it from Amazon’s end or the authors’ end. But I’ve bought lots of ebooks on sale that I wouldn’t have bought at “full price,” so those books’ authors made more from me than they otherwise would (however little that is).
I dunno if it’s much different than buying from the discount bin at Barnes and Noble, though. Like maybe that part isn’t really a market change.
This has resulted in some weird stuff, where some authors’ works are ripped off by AI and then people accuse them of using AI because AI sounds like them. When I think of AI ripping off my authorial voice, which I have taken decades of blood sweat and tears to develop, I go apoplectic.
It’s absolutely mind-boggling, I don’t know how the industry is going to solve it, but AI has already caused its fair share of chaos in the writing community.
Except people don’t write for the discount bin - books end up there after being rejected by the market. It is more likely every writer is a Rev, Fanthorpe, horribly written books direct to the public.
I’m a member of the Author’s Guild, and 40% of the message board is about AI. Another 40% is about scams enabled by AI.
In a few short years AI authors will be writing to seek the approval and accolades of an AI audience of reviewer bots. Literary agencies and publishing companies will use AI to evaluate manuscripts. AI will write the reviews for the major newspapers.
It will be interesting to see how their process develops when we’re less and less a part of the market they write for.