If you like to read e-books, but have serious disagreements with Amazon, you might be aware of something called “Kobo”, the second most famous ebook store (in the same way that Gustav Klimt is the second most famous Austrian painter). If you specifically like non-fiction books, you might be aware of an author called “David D Cottingham”, who writes “45 minute summaries” for the busy executive; over 100 of them apparently.
Up until a week ago when I told them to knock it off, the Kobo store was advertising a Cottingham summary of my book, “The Unaccountability Machine”. Which was a bit cheeky of them, since it isn’t actually published until the 18th of April.
I was quite interested, so I bought a copy. Here are some extracts. (In the circumstances, I feel like I will not be getting any copyright complaints, but if I do, this falls under the definition of “fair use”).
As you can see, it’s a really low-effort AI job – it looks to me like someone has copied and pasted the publishers’ blurb and summary into the premium version of ChatGPT and told it to produce thirty pages. I very much doubt there is any such person as “David D Cottingham”; presumably it’s some sort of scam on the Kobo self-publishing program.
In fairness to them, Kobo’s customer support seem to have acted pretty quickly in removing the “Unaccountability Machine” knockoff. (I note that they haven’t actually refunded me the £3.79 I spent checking it out yet, although they have promised to).
The press office of Rakuten (which owns the thing) have frankly been less impressive; it’s been a week and they haven’t replied to any of the questions I sent them along the lines of “How serious a problem is this kind of AI fake?” and “What are you doing to combat this sort of scam on your platform?”. I suspect the answers are along the lines of “nothing, not even deleting or suspending the actual Cottingham account” and “this second tier ebook thing is an absolute backwater for our business, we spend less time and money on it than WH Smiths does on carpet”
Anyway, I thought it was amusing. And particularly appropriate since the subtitle of the book is “Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions”. Have a great weekend folks.
Glad Kobo removed it, but I wonder if you'll have better luck getting Cottingham's whole account removed via Kobo's customer service than Rakuten's general press office. Cottingham is also using Kobo Plus (equivalent to Kindle Unlimited except it actually has a lot of high quality books) to get paid for free downloads of his spammy fake summaries, so perhaps you can report his misuse of that service as well.