Apple Books and Amazon Are Lousy With AI-Generated Books Ripping Off Legitimate Authors

Joanna Stern at New Things, last month : Last month, just days after my book went on sale, AI knockoffs of the ebook version flooded Apple Books. There was Joanna Stern On I Am Not A Robot by Sophie Mercer. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Finn Tech. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joana Stern — with one “n.” ( Watch our latest video showing all these titles and more.) In total, I found ten AI-generated ebooks clearly riding on mine, with AI-generated covers mimicking the style of my real one — the same blue, yellow and red color palette. Most were priced at $9.99, but some have gone as high as $20.99. [...] After I contacted Apple about my own book’s clones back in May, the knockoffs quickly disappeared. [...] But now, a month after that first Apple cleanup, the problem is back. At the start of this week, there were at least three other I AM NOT A ROBOT counterfeits on Apple Books. (They seem to have since been removed.) And I’m not alone. Lena Dunham’s Famesick has multiple lookalikes on the platform. Haley Sacks’s Future Rich Person has copycats that even use AI generated images of women on the cover that resemble the real author. Kashmir Hill at The New York Times today (gift link): Recently, I received a strange text from a new acquaintance. “You have your own biography???” it read. “How did you neglect to tell me this?” This was news to me. I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a

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