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Can you actually make real money at this? As it seems trivial to generate tons of books on niche topics if it is.


Yes, and this has been a problem for years: back in the 2000s, Amazon was already flooded with print-on-demand "books" that basically consisted of Wikipedia articles.


Maybe not for an engineer from silicon valley. For a third world country guy with no job, even $50 a month would mean survival.


You don't even have to generate the book until after it's sold.


The "don't need to have it to sell it" is how we got "Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies": https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

A bot with a good reputation adds a listing at 1.27x the price of a worse-reputation listing. Another bot had a conflicting strategy: selling at 0.99x the price of the next cheapest.


Not talking about the physical book, that's old news. LLMs drive the price and time requirements of "writing" the book down below what one consumer would require. So you could theoretically generate a listing, wait until someone hits it, and then ask the LLM to write a book that hopefully vaguely resembles what you promised.




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