📖 NBER’s latest on the effect of LLMs in publishing:
- The rate of new e-book releases on Amazon have tripled between 2022 and late 2025.
- Categories such as Travel and Sports and Outdoors have experienced growth by a factor of more than five.
- Average book quality has declined in the LLM era.
- Categories experiencing faster growth in new titles show proportionally larger declines in average quality.
- Survey evidence indicates that nearly half of authors now use AI to assist with their work.
- Authors who debuted in the LLM era disproportionately produce low-quality work, while authors who were active before the arrival of LLMs have increased their output, but continue to account for much of the higher-quality production.