Generative AI floods and dilutes the book market through scale, not quality

Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

The paper runs AI detection on 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books on Amazon from 2023 to 2026. Books with >25% AI text make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales—yet their sales share is growing, and they are taking top-rank slots from books with no detected AI. Over the period, the number of selling books grew 19.2× while revenue grew only 8.9×; revenue per selling book fell across most genres. Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion and where Kindle Unlimited is widespread. Among top sellers, AI-heavy books draw on more distinctive language from existing works, and that overlap rises with revenue—a pattern not seen for non-AI books. The findings speak directly to the market-effect question in fair use defenses to copyright infringement.

Why it matters: 14,419 self-published novels, full-text detection, daily sales data—this paper actually tests the 'AI slop doesn't sell' assumption with numbers. Not 85+ because it's a fresh arXiv preprint without media amplification yet, and it's limited to self-published genre fiction.