AI-generated books are showing up for sale under names and titles close enough to fool a distracted buyer, according to recent reports by Joanna Stern and Kashmir Hill. The targets are not obscure: Stern writes about technology for The Wall Street Journal, Hill covers technology for The New York Times, and both found books trading on their work or identities on major storefronts.
Stern wrote at New Things that shortly after her book, I Am Not a Robot, went on sale, Apple Books carried a set of AI-generated ebooks that appeared designed to catch readers looking for the real thing. She said she found 10 such ebooks tied to her book, including titles using her name, near-matches to her name, or the book’s title.
The mechanism is not sophisticated. It is search squatting with a paperback costume. Stern reported that the listings used AI-generated covers echoing the real book’s visual style, including a similar blue, yellow and red palette. Most were listed at $9.99, she wrote, with some priced as high as $20.99.
Stern said the Apple Books listings disappeared quickly after she contacted Apple in May. The cleanup did not hold. A month later, she wrote, at least three more counterfeits tied to I Am Not a Robot had appeared on Apple Books at the start of the week, though those also seemed to have been removed by the time she published.
Her report said the problem extended beyond her own title. Stern wrote that Lena Dunham’s Famesick had several lookalike books on Apple Books, and that Haley Sacks’s Future Rich Person had copycats using AI-generated cover images of women resembling the author.
Amazon’s version: an unwanted biography
Hill reported in The New York Times that she learned from a text message that Amazon was selling a biography of her. The book, titled The Biography of Kashmir Hill, had been released in August 2025, nearly a year before she found it, she wrote.
Hill said the listing had a publisher she did not recognize and no reviews until she posted one herself, asking to speak with the author. The hardcover was listed at $26.99, according to Hill, and her editor bought a copy.
The book was 90 pages long, Hill reported. She described it as a mix of publicly available facts about her life and broad, generic commentary. One passage dwelled on an elaborate coffee routine, which Hill corrected: her husband makes the coffee.
The Amazon case points to a slightly different failure mode than the Apple Books examples. Stern’s report describes near-duplicate commercial piggybacking on a newly released book. Hill’s account describes a low-effort biographical product built around a real person’s name, sold in print through Amazon’s marketplace.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball noted that the issue is not limited to ebooks, citing cheap printing services and Hill’s reporting on an author who commissioned print editions for hundreds of these AI-generated books.
The reports leave the platform question sitting in plain view. Apple removed Stern’s reported knockoffs after she complained, according to Stern, but similar listings returned. Amazon sold Hill a printed biography she did not know existed until someone else found it. In both cases, the stores appear to have made the affected writers do the detection work after publication.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.