On November 14, 2023, Rush frontman and virtuoso bassist Geddy Lee released his long-awaited memoir. I’ll cut to the chase: My Effin’ Life doesn’t just deliver. It is freakin’ amazing. I blew through the 500-page book in a week. (I only wish that I could have attended the book tour. YouTube videos were the best I could do, but let’s return to the topic at hand.)

If you’ve read The Nine or have been paying attention to contemporary publishing, you know what was coming. Thanks to generative AI, anyone can quickly create bland summaries of Lee’s release—or just about any other book, for that matter. Sarah Silverman is far from the only apopleptic author.

As of January 3, 2024, Amazon listed 52 such entries:

Think of these as the modern equivalents of Cliffs Notes, except humans did virtually nothing to create them. The tech did all of the heavy lifting.

One knockoff lists a publication date of—ready for this?—November 14, 2023. Yep, that’s the same day that Lee’s book arrived. (You just can’t make this stuff up.)

No cover designer worth her salt would attach her name to such atrocities. As for their interior design, the word yuck readily comes to mind. Here’s a typical screenshot from one of these cheap forgeries:

Note this, er, title’s generous margins—no doubt designed to bolster the page count and attempt to justify its cost.

What’s Next?

We learned in The Long Tail that the web provides for infinite distribution. It’s both a blessing and a curse. With respect to the latter, low-quality knockoffs clutter pages and make it difficult for customers to find products they truly want.

Amazon has already limited the number of books that self-published authors can submit each day. (It’s a risible number, but at least it’s something.) I’d be shocked if the behemoth didn’t place further restrictions against these types of “titles” in the coming year.