[SilverBirch]

I think you can kind of view this as a Signal:Noise ratio problem. Previously there were good books and bad books, but the signal to noise ratio was relatively high, it wasn't particularly easy to write passable bad books and the bad books were a lot worse than the good books. So it was very easy to distinguish the good books from the bad and there were enough good books. Now LLMs have made bad books better - making it difficult to distinguish bad books from good books essentially raising the nosie floor, and made writing bad books easier - increasing the total noise in the system. This results in a much worse environment - it's much more difficult to pick out good books from amongst the noise and there's much more noise. Imagine someone rolled out an extremely popular new product that let people broadcast across the entire nation on FM radio frequencies with no way of stopping it. Suddenly FM radio is flooded with shit. What do you think would happen? People would just abandon FM radio entirely. Radio stations would give up - they can't get to their listeners anymore because they're constantly getting over-ridden by random people broadcasting, and listeners would turn off unable to listen to anything.

I think the same thing may happen here - some genres may literally just disapper because there's no way to match readers with writers anymore in a way that's economical.

[aworks]

I think there is still a place for filtering of physical books. Both bookstores and libraries do a reasonable job of presenting a set of potential books to read.

I'm reasonably happy with the average physical book I read. That's much less true for ebooks.

And I mostly buy books from Amazon that I've heard about elsewhere so don't depend on that filter as much.

[SilverBirch]

Physical bookstores are on the complete other end of the Signal:Noise ratio spectrum, you've got such an enormous cost of publishing that even quality isn't enough (and this is the old problem of book publishing) you won't get a physical book produced unless (a) you have a track record, (b) you publish it yourself or )c) you're a celebrity who is using their celebrity to sell books or (d) you're great and you sign a usurious deal with a book publisher.

In the same way that the noise floor is becoming too high for eBooks, the quality threshold is too high for real books - (d) basically doesn't happen because you have to be so great and sign such a bad deal. Not least because publishers have consolidated into an effective monopoly.