I've been getting these too — they've largely supplanted the plausibly-human-written glurge I used to get (mil-SF and disturbingly specific romance subgenres). I don't think I've given Amazon any reason to believe I'd want them, though. My guess is that these are just the highest-expected-profit books that Kindle has, and it's what you get if Kindle doesn't have a more specific signal for you.
I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.
Lately I've noticed that in self pub pulp land authors are trading shoutouts with each other without curation or discretion, but even those are self selecting to a higher degree of 'gives a shit' than what the algo reccs have been offering. I think it has been over a year since I found something off of the 'if you liked X' carousel and that used to be extremely reliable for me.
And like I said, I'm reading pulp. I'm the kind of person who will see 'this is my first ever written work please be nice' as a synopsis and will read the first ten chapters just to see. There's plenty of decent trash around if I look for it but the robots only want me to have the soup at the bottom.
> I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.
This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".
There are two principal ways in which businesses make sales. Either by giving people what they want or need at a price they are happy to pay. These businesses don't need advertisement to drive demand, as word of mouth is such a powerful force. The other way is by using advertising. That's why normal consumers will never be shown an ad for any product or service that they would be interested in buying.
Honestly, I have no problem with airport novel quality books, and the thing is, these tend to be competently written - clearly there's such a huge oversupply of writing talent that even throwaway books are kind of decent. I suspect even people who only manage to sell hundreds of copies have quite a bit of talent and years of practice.
The market doesn't need the flood of this AI garbage as it will make these books utterly impossible to discover and drown the low end in excrement, driving away 'guilty pleasure' readers such as me and you.
