Dystopia Status Level: ADS IN BOOKS 😡
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Makes me crazy that some products simply *can’t* be bought anywhere besides Amazon.
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@susankayequinn Literally just yesterday I learned about Terry Pratchett's German publisher inserting soup ads into The Light Fantastic back in the 90s and I thought "oh that's so gross, surely nobody will ever do that again"
Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne for a dozen books to raising sales. I remember reading it in the Jahrbuch der Science Fiction and Fantasy 1994 (Annual of…
Stuffed Crocodile (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
@joshsutphin @susankayequinn Wow. And it seems Heyne Verlag (the ad vandal / publishing house) is still in operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyne_Verlag
I wouldn’t have thought you were allowed to piss off both Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett and still keep your book business.
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@susankayequinn Literally just yesterday I learned about Terry Pratchett's German publisher inserting soup ads into The Light Fantastic back in the 90s and I thought "oh that's so gross, surely nobody will ever do that again"
Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne for a dozen books to raising sales. I remember reading it in the Jahrbuch der Science Fiction and Fantasy 1994 (Annual of…
Stuffed Crocodile (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
@joshsutphin @susankayequinn *CERVEZA CRISTAL*
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@joshsutphin @susankayequinn Wow. And it seems Heyne Verlag (the ad vandal / publishing house) is still in operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyne_Verlag
I wouldn’t have thought you were allowed to piss off both Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett and still keep your book business.
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@joshsutphin @susankayequinn Wow. And it seems Heyne Verlag (the ad vandal / publishing house) is still in operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyne_Verlag
I wouldn’t have thought you were allowed to piss off both Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett and still keep your book business.
Oh, yes, Heyne is one of Germany's biggest publishers of Fantasy, not many ways around them. They publish a LOT of translations.
I don't read Terry Pratchett in German (ugh, I hate translations, most are bad), but I remember books having ads in them myself - very clearly ads, on their own page though, not snuck into the text like Sue's example.
Those ads happened in the 1970s, for some reason. Still, I'm sure it was in the contract.
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@farbel first, you don't know that; second, they're *already* putting chatbots in the ebooks; third, Amazon has a long long LONG history of just rolling out stuff in small batch trials to see how it floats; fourth, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was AI accidentally left in the ebook by a shitty AI enthusiast author; fifth, people have OPENLY talked about ads in ebooks FOREVER; sixth, if this is none of the above, wait a minute, that will change.
Yeah, that looks like an AI-slopped book that hasn't been edited properly. I just spied an m-dash in the next sentence. *snicker*
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@susankayequinn Interesting. When I log in, it doesn't do that. I wonder why? My reviews appear to all be there in their original format. I wonder why? I see that chatbot is an option in the app, if, for some odd reason, a reader wants to ask questions about a book instead of just reading it. I have never come across it in my reading, because I don't do that.
It's above the reviews of every book I look at on Amazon, a "summary" of what people love about the book. It's not labeled as "AI", but that's clearly what it is.
Below that are the usual reviews, they are not changed. But how many people actually read on beyond that summary?
I know people no longer review much on Amazon, either, they just hit the stars at the end of an ebook, and that's it.
I will never review on Amazon again, I use Bookwyrm now.
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@joshsutphin @susankayequinn that was also my first thought since I owned a book with such an ad and I remember being really confused and weirded out by it back then…
(Not sure if it was Terry Pratchett or some other book by the same publisher)@Larymir @joshsutphin @susankayequinn Sometimes I feel ancient. Actually, after the war when pocket books came up, you would find an ad here and there - I remember ads for cigarettes, and yes, soup - like broth, Maggi, I think. It was a German publisher, rororo, I remember. I don't think the author was asked for permission, maybe it was somewhere in the contract. They stopped this eventually - I think once pocket books were more accepted.
This does not mean I condone A.'s behavior. -
Dystopia Status Level: ADS IN BOOKS
My dear readers, you can leave Amazon, I promise. Even reducing Amazon usage helps, but *especially* for books. There are alternatives.
Here's how to find them:
https://susankayequinn.com/how-to-buy-sues-books-a-guide-to-retailers@susankayequinn Centralized ebook platforms can force unwanted revisions into books you've 'bought' with an ease that'd make heads spin at the ministry of truth. No recalls necessary, just quietly push edits. Before I stopped using amazon I saw books I'd owned for years suddenly displaying new covers - and changes to the text would have been just as easy to implement and a lot harder to catch.
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Dystopia Status Level: ADS IN BOOKS
My dear readers, you can leave Amazon, I promise. Even reducing Amazon usage helps, but *especially* for books. There are alternatives.
Here's how to find them:
https://susankayequinn.com/how-to-buy-sues-books-a-guide-to-retailers@susankayequinn I think it's important to clear up some miss information. This wasn't inserted by Amazon. The author did this intentionally. (Full disclosure, the other comments hadn't loaded on my instance yet. I am going to leave it here, but it looks like other people have brought up the same point.
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Yeah, that looks like an AI-slopped book that hasn't been edited properly. I just spied an m-dash in the next sentence. *snicker*
@Firlefanz @susankayequinn @farbel
I saw a video about amazon eBooks getting edited. As in old classics getting edited to have mentions of tiktok, instagram, facebook, twitter to make them more "current" but to me it smells like advertisement shit cakes to try to get people who read books to stop by their social medias instead.
Paperbacks they can't change at least...
