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Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
Cheap AI-written novels flood Amazon, and every book's slice of revenue shrinks, human-written ones included.
19.2-fold
Growth in quarterly selling books
Books competing for sales grew far faster than the revenue pool.
How it works
Slop assumed harmless
AI-written genre fiction is dismissed as low-quality and commercially irrelevant. Nobody had measured its effect on the whole market.
Scan every full text
Ran an AI detector over 14,419 self-published Amazon ebooks, then matched each book to daily sales through June 2026.
Volume dilutes returns
AI-heavy books took growing sales share and top ranks. Revenue per book fell, even for books with no AI text.
From the paper