The Indicator from Planet Money
The Indicator from Planet Money

AI is pumping out books. Are they any good?

June 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2022, about 100,000 new e-books went on sale each month on Amazon. By mid-2025, that number had tripled to 300,000 per month. The cause, according to economists Imke Reimers (Cornell) and Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota), is a direct consequence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. They found that the explosion in new titles matched almost one-for-one with the rise in AI-generated writing. But the central question, which they tackled through an economic lens, is whether these books are any good—and the answer, at least for now, is a clear "no."

The AI Book Boom

Reimers and Waldfogel have studied the digitization of cultural products for over 15 years. To understand the scale of the AI disruption, they focused on Amazon, which controls roughly two-thirds of the e-book market. Before ChatGPT's public release, the platform saw about 100,000 new e-book titles per month. After its release, that number rose steadily to 300,000.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:06) **The Prolific Writer Benchmark** - Hosts introduce the output of human authors like Stephen King and Isaac Asimov as a contrast for AI's book production.
  • 2 (00:49) **Introducing the Economic Lens on Quality** - Hosts frame the episode's central question about the quality of AI-generated books.
  • 3 (02:06) **The Economists' Investigation Begins** - Economists Imka Rimers and Joel Walfogel set out to measure the AI book boom.
  • 4 (03:22) **The Data: A Tripling of E-Books** - The economists quantify the explosion in new e-book releases on Amazon.
  • 5 (04:11) **Attributing the Boom to AI** - The researchers use AI detection software to confirm the source of the new books.
  • 6 (04:44) **Defining "Good" by Sales and Ratings** - The economists measure quality by looking at consumer behavior, not literary merit.
  • 7 (05:33) **The Verdict: AI Books Are "Not Good"** - The data shows AI-generated books underperform compared to human-written ones.

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Show Notes

Are all these AI books any good? And by good, we mean are people willing to buy them — not whether the prose is singing. We talk to two researchers who’ve got some answers and a travel guide expert on why AI can’t replace first-hand experience.

Fact checking by Sierra Juarez. 

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