Amazon flooded with AI books: Crisis of trust in literature market

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Amazon flooded with AI books

Triple growth after ChatGPT

After the launch of ChatGPT, the book market faced a sharp increase in content. According to The Economist, citing a study by economists Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel, before November 2022, around 100,000 new e-books were released on Amazon each month. By the end of 2025, that figure had grown to about 300,000 works per month.

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The researchers checked the books using an AI detector and concluded that most of the growth came from texts created or heavily edited with the help of chatbots. This is no longer about isolated experiments by enthusiasts, but about the mass production of books, which is fundamentally changing the market.

Amazon became an ideal platform for this surge: an e-book can be published there directly, without a publisher, literary agent or lengthy editorial preparation. As a result, after the emergence of ChatGPT, creating a book stopped being a long creative process for many people and became a task that could be completed in a few hours.

How it all began

Back in 2023, Reuters reported on the first authors who began using ChatGPT to publish books on Amazon. One of them was Brett Schickler, a salesman from Rochester who had long dreamed of writing a book but did not believe he would ever be able to make that idea a reality. Everything changed after he discovered ChatGPT.

With the help of the chatbot, Schickler created a 30-page children’s book in a few hours about a baby squirrel who learns how to save money and invest. The illustrations were also created with AI. The author then listed the book on Amazon: the e-book version was priced at $2.99, while the print version cost $9.99.

Sales were modest and brought him less than $100. But the point was not the income, but the model itself: a person with no writing experience was able to quickly go from an idea to publication. Even then, it became clear that ChatGPT was lowering the barrier to entry so much that a book was becoming not only a creative project, but also a quick experiment with the possibility of earning money.

There is quantity, but no hits

However, the growth in the number of books does not mean that neural networks have learned how to create bestsellers. Reimers and Waldfogel decided to assess the quality of AI books through reader reactions: star ratings, the number of reviews and Amazon sales rankings.

By these measures, works created with AI lagged behind texts written by humans. They had fewer reviews, lower average ratings and weaker sales. In other words, AI sharply increased the number of new publications, but quality was not part of the equation.

The problem is not only quality

But even weak sales do not make AI books harmless for the market. Such publications still compete for readers’ attention, appear in search results and make it harder to find quality texts. As a result, Amazon is facing not only an increase in the number of books, but also a crisis of trust.

For readers, the problem is that an AI book does not always look like a product of a neural network. It can have a cover, a description, an author name and even several reviews. But behind all of this, there may be no real writer, no editorial work and no personal experience. This is especially sensitive for nonfiction, children’s literature and practical guides, where readers expect author competence.

For real writers, the situation is also becoming more difficult. Their books end up alongside thousands of quickly assembled AI publications that can copy popular topics, genres and keywords. All these texts create noise and dilute the value of authors’ work.

That is why the rise of AI books on Amazon looks not like a technological curiosity, but like a serious shift for the entire industry. ChatGPT has not destroyed literature and has not created a new wave of bestsellers. But it has sharply increased the volume of content and shown how vulnerable the literature market has become.

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