Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.
The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. “While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations,” read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon’s site.
Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted “if needed”. The company confirmed that there was previously no limit to the number of books authors could list a day.
Wow! Only three bookks a day? Publish or parish thing has gotten out of control.
George R. R. Martin: ok.
That isn’t a limit even Stephen King probably would struggle to release one book a month, let alone three books a day.
I want to meet an author who is genuinely inconvenienced by this.
If you’re gone go that way, then limit it to one book per MONTH, anything faster than that would be suspect
I don’t see a problem with someone publishing a backlog of multiple books at once. 3 per day seems pretty reasonable. Maybe even something like 3 per day and at most 10 per month might work.
On the other hand though, say you’ve been writing a web novel that could be sliced up into 3 separate books or you just have 3 books that’s only now getting released. You could release them over time or you could choose to have all 3 go up at once. Not to mention as a first act of defense, it’s a reasonable action to make and is easily adjustable later on.
There’s probably other reasons why someone would release more than one book at once that’s completely understandable, especially when considering what technically counts as a “book” such as translations or a company publishing titles of multiple authors under one name,
Multiple authors published in one book wouldn’t happen in self-publishing because there’s no incentive. The point about a collection of short stories is that it isn’t economical for a publisher to publish them individually, but with self-publishing that economic restriction doesn’t exist.
Unless they’re short stories, or someone putting out a chapter at a time for cheap and then compiling them into collections later. Still 3 chapters a day is pretty extreme, maybe a chapter a day I could see if you have the work ethic of Stephen King.
Oh no, now the AI will have to think up new author names as well!
Not defending Amazon, but… despite allowing unlimited pen names, they all have to be under the same account. Multiple publishing accounts can get you banned, and good luck explaining why multiple accounts have the same financial information when you go to withdraw your $5.
