scalyshoujo

It sounds like KDP's rolling out ID Verificaton to more North Americans now. Authors are required to submit a government ID for verification.

This is not a new program, it was announced a year ago, yet there are reports of people having their accounts terminated because they can't upload their government ID or get Amazon to recognize it. It's not surprising because Amazon KDP's customer service is notorious for being highly-automated and script-driven.

You already have to give Amazon your tax info to get paid, so this is not a huge ask, and it can potentially curb abuse since KDP only allows people to have one account per lifetime. These days a single person can feasibly run a content farm thanks to AI tools, so maybe this will help with slop, but I feel like it will probably only deter people casually trying (and failing, I assure you) to make a quick buck, and not the organized content farms who are really abusing the system.

I sometimes wonder if banning low content and public domain books outright would help at all. Kobo is reportedly cracking down on restricted content (which also includes partially or completely AI-generated work, but if memory serves they're primarily targeting PD and LC books) and Draft2Digital will not distribute PD books at all. Amazon does scrutinize this content to the extent public domain ebooks are generally considered risky and not worth risking an account ban.

I guess the truth is, the real volume of problematic content is gonna be slop: either AI generated mishmash or machine-translated works that are able to get past Amazon's "content published elsewhere" sniff test. Enough forbidden extreme/taboo content already somehow gets past their content checks, so I'm not sure how good their sniff tests are in the first place, but they're definitely not good enough to reliably sniff out AI slop.

I said TOW2 was a day-one purchase for me, and I'm gonna have to go back on that promise, but I sincerely appreciate the irony of the Outer Worlds, of all things, being Microsoft's first $80 title.

Come October, I shall play through the first game and associated DLC yet again, and when the sequel invariably goes on sale for $40 two months later I'll be there, slobbering and drooling as I gorge myself on sweet, sweet anti-capitalist jank.

You can be a complete freak about something and still set the price, lads. That's all I'm sayin'.