The article is mostly nonsense mixed with misunderstanding. There was a time before publishers where everyone essentially self published by paying a printer, that never really went away but what changed was advertising and distribution. If all a publisher did was print your book then it'd have the same chances of being read as if you had self-published. eBooks have had a mixed impact because they a) lowered the price and difficulty to self-publish and b) made wide distribution cheap or free but they did not have any meaningful impact on advertising. Introducing LLMs or any other form of automated production of content to the mix does not impact advertising either. All it does is increase the speed of production for everyone, good authors, amateurs and those looking to make a quick buck.

The author complains that they are finding bad content when they search for books. Guess what, that's a search problem not a problem with the content. Search is only useful if it returns relevant results. All this talk of betrayal and trust is just a symptom of crappy search or recommendation algorithms. It doesn't win any sympathy that they are also complaining about free books on Kindle Unlimited so they aren't even cheated out of money, they simply lost a tiny bit of time since they indicate they can quickly identify machine generated content.

This

> There is no feeling of betrayal like thinking you are about to read something that another person slaved over, only to discover you've been tricked.

and this

> Part of the reason people invest so many hours into reading is because we know the author invested far more in writing.

are incomprehensible to me as they appear to be some subset of sadism that derives pleasure from someone enduring a form of hardship. Not quite the same since parts of creative work are enjoyable but still weird because any form of creative work will inevitably have large sections of difficult, tedious or just unpleasant effort that goes into it. Saying that something has less value to you because its creator used a tool to make the bad parts easier to do is just wrongheaded. The only argument that could stand is if the tool they use made their output worse in which case it is justifiable to criticize it but the same goes for an author who doesn't bother to edit his own work or to ask another person to check it and edit or takes other shortcuts like ignoring consistency or using tired plot devices or copying some popular style.

> Good writing kills its darlings. If you don't care enough about a section to write it, then I don't care enough to read it.

That is just not what that phrase means. "Kill your darlings" means to throw away parts that you care about, it's literally the exact opposite of what they're saying here.

Honestly just skimming the rest it seems the author does a lot of work to paint a picture but it doesn't do much to support the argument. A great deal is made of the effort it takes to read a book and decide if it's worthy of recommending or selling in a book store. This just ties back to the search problem and is ironically a place where LLMs and similar ML tools could help a great deal since they can make for excellent classification and recommendation engines. It's pointless to complain about the volume of books since this was already an untenable problem with only human authors and the sheer weight of history. The author says that a book seller may read 80 books a year, certainly an accomplishment but absolutely nothing compared to the number of books published each year[0]:

- 500,000 to 1 million from traditional publishers

- 1.7 million from self-publishing

- 130 million globally

Once again, it's a search problem. When you have 130 million new titles per year it really doesn't matter if you make it 230 million or 1 billion if your solution is to chip away at it 80 titles at a time, you need automation. Fixing search and recommendation is the only thing that will impact the awareness and advertising side of the business. If you don't fix it then yes publishers will carry more weight for their ability to vet their authors but this is nothing new and was not meaningfully impacted by digital publishing as already established. I'm afraid the thing the author is decrying is exactly the medicine they need.

[0] https://wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-20...