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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

And the flood really is overwhelming. This weekend my mom was complaining about having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle Unlimited. I mentioned that the relative lack of slop is one of the major reasons I chose Kobo over Kindle. Even before this latest AI boom I was already starting to view less content as a feature, not a bug, because it seems that on subscription services “more” is increasingly just a polite way of saying “more crap.”

Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.

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I really wanted to like Kobo but the no refunds policy really burned me. I bought a book listed as being in English, with an English title and English on the cover page, but the contents were entirely in French and they wouldn't refund it because of the general no refund policy. I just felt ripped off because what I bought, as advertised, just wasn't what I received.

That would be illegal in Australia, even if the policy was prominently displayed up front.

Claiming otherwise is to treat each book as a packet of Pokémon trading cards, where you know you’re getting some cards, but you don’t get to choose which ones.

Much, much more difficult to enforce / obtain remedy, but it’s also against the law in the USA as well.

In the USA you could possibly just contact your credit card company and have them issue a chargeback. And then Kobo might just let it go because it costs more to contest it.

Take care. In North America some services will ban you for doing a chargeback and that can be a big problem if you have a lot of content on the service

> This weekend my mom was complaining about having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle Unlimited.

I don't understand this. Who goes to an online store to decide what to read? Rather than just buy what you wanted to buy.

I would expect that people were going to.. places where people talk about books. Like goodreads, or even some interesting thread on /r/books, or whatever. And then, well, after you decide what to read, you think about how you will obtain it. I think people have their priorities inverted.

And I think like that because the storefront doesn't have your best interest at heart. For them you're just a number on a bottom line.

Have you never gone to a bookstore in real life and just browsed? Not everything has to come from recommendation or reviews or research. It can just be pure exploration.

Its the same process online and offline: See an interesting cover/title, read the dust cover, skim a page to get the writing style, buy or dont buy.

Sure, you will get "more bad than good" but not everything needs to be efficient, and in the old days, the bookstore played the role of curator so you could have a great experience spending a few hours in the store. You would come away having discovered a book that isnt the hotest thing on some review site or message board. That's probably the experience she has been replicating, but now the overall quality has gone down.

I don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.

> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle

because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.

> reading to books > 10 years old

I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.

It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.

In general old good stuff is easier to find than new good stuff, since over time the bad stuff becomes more irrelevant, but I feel there's also some truth to the over-optimization as you put it.

However, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, in my opinion there is some new good stuff (books, music, movies, etc.) still being created, even if it's harder to find in the sea of mediocrity.

A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.

Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.

> An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time),

Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.

I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).

In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.

I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.

I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.

I think we underestimate how much of reading happens from the shallow romance section of the bookstores.

It's big business and is really not that deep. For someone who isn't part of that world(which is big business) to judge what is good or not is hard.

And now it's cheap to produce that "pulp romance" novels en masse. So people who have little clue about this genre can produce something that seems good, but doesn't appeal to the reader.

Actually effective, human-powered recommendation systems already exist, and they’re great.

My favorite implementation of this is talking to the clerks at my neighborhood bookstore. But the New York Review of Books is an alternative that’s easier to enjoy from home. For romance novels I like the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Also this is kind of cheating but I have a family member who reviews books for a library journal so a lot of the time I just let her tell me what to read.

After many years on audible, I left because there was a deluge of AI generated works or AI voice 'readings' of (especially public domain) works on there. It's especially galling because they make up fake names for their AI voice and force me to trawl IMDB to figure out if this is a real guy who just randomly has really inappropriate tone and tempo for the passage I just heard, or if I have been scammed. Regardless, it's a clear and unacceptable deterioration of my product quality as a subscriber, so I'm off.

I don't know exactly how the incentives work for uploading shitloads of different slop readings of old novels on there, but it seemed to show no sign of slowing down.

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