Good morning authors and welcome to another #writerwednesday where we talk shop, industry, and more. The hot topic of 2023's back end remains AI and how it continues to impact both the entertainment and publishing industry. In previous posts I hinted that AI would continue to shake up the landscape until the big heads started laying down foundational guidelines and laws for it. It surprises no one that Amazon, juggernaut that it is, is the first to start talking strides in that direction. And they are certainly interesting strides. I feel myself gearing up to do a how post series on the Ethics of AI but TODAY we are going to talk about Amazon's new way of stemming the flood.
Amazon's New KDP Limiters
Earlier this month, Amazon announced new policy guidelines for their Kindle Direct Publishing branch, asking authors to inform if they were using AI in the creation of their work, including cover art and text. They made a distinction for authors who use AI programs for editorial aid and quality improvement, but if the content was generated using AI, authors had to at least tell Amazon. However, the new policy did not require the author to inform the buyer their product was AI generated. The publishing community wasn't sure what Amazon intended to do with this internal information but this week, the next step appears to be focusing on the volume of AI books being pushed into the market.
Earlier this week, Amazon quietly put a cap on the number of books that could be published via their Kindle Direct Publishing platform per day. Under this new limitation, users cannot update more than three titles on the platform per day. This includes the creation and uploading of new titles, and, to my understanding, this also extends to updating previously uploaded content. The limitation might be tricky for some smaller presses that publish their roster of authors under Amazon's publishing branch, but for most indie authors, it may mean simply tweaking the way they update older content and release new content. The purpose of this new policy seems to be focused on stemming the flood of rapidly published AI content in order to rebalance the market in favor of Indie Authors, though time will tell to see how effective a three a day limitation is or if more extensive limitations may factor into the future.