NPR.

Think about some of the Western world's most famously prolific writers.

You have horror novelist Stephen King.

He's written more than 60 bestselling books and hundreds of short stories.

There's also sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, who produced more than 500 fiction and nonfiction books,

and also English romance novelist Barbara Cartland, who wrote more than 700 books during her career.

So much swooning.

But today, large language models or LLMs can match that kind of output in a single year.

The number of new book releases on Amazon almost

tripled between 2022 and 2025. That's an increase that can be attributed to LLMs. But are these

AI written books any good? This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And I'm

Waylon Wong. Today on the show, we tackle this quality question through an economic lens.

Plus, we hear from a human editor at a niche publisher about how they're fighting the slot wars.

Economist Imka Rhymers and Joel Walfogel have worked together for more than 15 years.

Imca's at Cornell University and Jol's at the University of Minnesota.

Together, they've studied how cultural products like music and books have gone digital.

And sometimes this has involved some firsthand experience, as Imka explains.

I tried out to see how easy it is to self-publish a book, not to try to sell any units, to be very clear, to just say, oh, yeah, I self-published a book. Please don't buy it. What was your book about? Oh, it was a half-page about my day. It was nothing. I feel like you're underselling it, but okay. I really am not.

Didn't you get two five-star reviews?

Yes, because two people did not listen to my plea not to buy it.

Well, it sounds like Imka is part of this wave of self-publishing because the number of self-published books skyrocketed in 2008 following the launch of Amazon's Kindle E-Reader.

Then, 2022 brought another big disruption, the widespread availability of large language models like Chatchip-T.

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