Apple has just launched Year in Review, a Spotify Wrapped-style round-up for its Books app, where you’ll be able to see personalized stats covering all the books you read in the app over the past year. If you’re curious about who your most-read author is and how long you spent leafing through literature in 2023, you’ll want to take a look.
You’ll need to open the Books app and select the Read Now tab in the bottom-left corner, then find the 'Your Year in Review' card under the Top Picks header. Tap that and you’ll find a bunch of fascinating facts about your reading habits from the last 12 months. Note that you’ll need to have marked at least three books as completed to get your reading summary.
For example, Apple has created six ‘reader types’ that are defined by the way you read or listen to literature. These types include 'The Completionist' for readers who consume multiple books in a series, and 'The Contemporary' for people who love trending titles.
Apple has also published several lists of the most-read books across all Books users – Spare by Prince Harry took the top spot for a non-fiction title, while Only the Dead by Jack Carr was the top fiction audiobook. The company did something similar for its Podcasts app, where you can see all the top-ranked shows among listeners.
Better than Apple Music Replay
Apple has put an emphasis on sharing this year, with book cover collages, graphs and statistics to send to your friends. All of this reading info is contained within Apple’s Books app, which makes it easy to catch up with your year-end review in between reading a novel or listening to an audiobook.
That makes it very different from Apple Music Replay. This is Apple Music’s take on Spotify Wrapped and, like Books’ Year in Review, gives you a deep dive into your music tastes in 2023.
The difference, though, is that Apple Music Replay is hosted on Apple’s website, not in the Apple Music app. You can still see all the same stats and figures as you’d expect, but there’s an extra degree of friction in the process. Compare that to Spotify, where its Wrapped round-up is right there at your fingertips in the app.
Why Apple built the Year in Review into its Books app but still refrains from making Apple Music Replay an app-based feature is a mystery. Regardless, head over to Apple’s Books app if you want to get the lowdown on your reading habits in 2023.
Along with the impressive demonstrations and sounds of alarm that have come with the dawn of generative-text chatbots, we’re also now seeing some of the more questionable and perhaps less desirable outcomes starting to materialize.
Authors and several news outlets have recently reported a significant uptick in AI-generated books showing up in multiple best-seller lists, many seemingly sounding like nonsense.
Self-publishing, such as via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program, has become a way for many genuine authors to bring their work to the public and build a following without the help of a large publisher. Because these self-publishing capabilities are purposely easy to sign up for, it seems anyone can generate endless AI-written books and upload them to be sold on Amazon’s eBook store and make them available for reading via Kindle Unlimited.
Recently, an indie author, Caitlyn Lynch, tweeted about noticing that only 19 of the best sellers in the Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart on Amazon were real, legit books. The rest were nonsensical and incoherent, and seemingly AI-generated.
The AI bots have broken Amazon.Take a look at the Best Sellers in Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart.I can see 19 actual legit books.https://t.co/fy9rtV6Ck6The rest are AI nonsense clearly there to click farm.@AmazonKDP what are you doing about it? pic.twitter.com/cziuKcQrq3June 26, 2023
See more
The Motherload website later looked into dozens of books on the platform and saw that a few days after Lynch’s tweets, the AI books had vanished from the best-seller lists, probably removed by Amazon.
They were, however, still available for purchase, and had enjoyed a significant amount of visibility before vanishing. Also, as Lynch very understandably speculates, the mass uploading of AI-generated books could be used to facilitate click-farming, where 'bots' click through a book automatically, generating royalties from Amazon Kindle Unlimited, which pays authors by the amount of pages that are read in an ebook. So, it doesn’t matter that these books disappear. The people running such a scheme could just upload as many as they like to replace the removed ones.
A major concern quickly emerges both for authors and readers – most of us readers are seeking out books that, at least for now, are written by human authors, and this makes it harder to find those kinds of books. Lynch, elaborating on her views in a Twitter thread, emphasized that this “will … be the death knell for Kindle Unlimited” if Amazon cannot contain this.
What is Amazon doing about it?
Motherboard reached out to Amazon and received a reply that stated that it had “clear guidelines” for which books can be listed for sale and would investigate when concerns are raised in order to protect both readers and authors. It didn’t explicitly state that it was making an effort specifically to address the apparent spam-like persistent uploading of nonsensical and incoherent AI-generated books. It’s worth Amazon taking an active approach to rectify this issue in order to reassure readers that it’s worth continuing to support authors via ebook sales and page views (which result in royalties for authors on Kindle Unlimited), and reassure authors that it’s worth putting their work on sale on Amazon.
We’ve also contacted Amazon to find out what it is doing about this, and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
AI-generated and assisted books aren’t totally new, and followed quite quickly after the debut of text-generator and image-generator Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. These books were already contentious, as many artists and authors felt that such generated books denigrated the work it takes to put together, write, and publish a book.
Furthermore, AI generators work by scraping huge amounts of visual and text content from the internet – some of which the creators of this content never consented to.
Mass-flooding of best-seller lists with nonsensical books will only intensify these concerns of quality control and authenticity. It’s not clear why there is such a boom in AI-generated books appearing in best-seller lists, but many speculate that it’s due to bot-farming, where large amounts of books are automatically generated and published. In my opinion, if this is the case then it’s definitely up to Amazon to address this problem, as authors and readers don’t have the technical capabilities to counteract such operations.
That can then lead to one AI-written book using text from another AI-written book, without any fact-checking, and (especially in the instance of non-fiction books), a worrying feedback loop is created that spreads misinformation and makes it hard to pin down the origin of statements.
For now, maybe Amazon will optimize its process of removing AI-generated nonsensical content as it appears, but greater efforts are needed. As of May 2023, Amazon’s Kindle Publishing didn’t require sellers to disclose if the book had been written (or illustrated) with the help of AI generators such as ChatGPT or Midjourney.
There's also a big problem that continues to plague Amazon and other online marketplaces for a multitude of products, and books are no exception: fake reviews. Text AI generators make this worse by making it easier to flood a review section both in the content and quantity. With Prime Day coming up, make sure you check out our guide on how to spot fake reviews on Amazon.
Unfortunately, along with all the positive new things that are possible with AI generators, inevitably, they can also be misused. Hopefully, Amazon acknowledges the growing concerns coming from both authors and readers, and makes efforts that help set a precedent for protecting human-created works – and their audiences.