If the books shown in his Substack are the only "fake" books he is complaining about, um, if people are buying those and thinking they are buying his, I'm sorry but maybe they aren't the sharpest pencils in the box.
The first book has a title of "Performative Book for Robert Reich: The Coming Up Short Assessment of America, A Prosopography." Then an author name of Damien Englewood. If I were looking for a book by Robert Reich, I certainly wouldn't presume that to be one.
The second book, "The Last Class: The Real Story Behind Robert Reich's Farewell to Berkeley" by Elara M. Vintrow, does not appear to be a book by Robert Reich either. Now, in this case, he may have cause for complaint as the cover is his image and, presumably, was used without permission.
I can't speak to the contents as I could not find either on Amazon and could not do a "Look Inside" or anything.
I did find a book entitled "The Last Class" that was advertised as a review of the movie. I mean, I don't know why you would want to buy a movie review from an unknown author when there are plenty of free movie reviews online from both recognizable movie reviewers and regular movie attendees.
Titles cannot be copyrighted. Robert Reich should probably know this. Maybe there is a trademark on it, but that is not mentioned in his post.
Anyway, I know nothing of the contents of any of the books mentioned. If any of them were just AI generated nonsense, yeah, I agree that there's too much of that, but if you can't show any content from the books infringes upon your copyright, you're out of luck.
Again, I think he has a case with the cover image on the one book.
And not finding an author in a Google search is meaningless. Many authors don't have websites so the only place you can find them is on Amazon or other bookstores.
And, again, I wouldn't think any of those books were written by him. It's either people aren't the sharpest pencils in the box or they aren't paying attention and they just mindlessly hit the "Add All to Cart" button under "Frequently Bought Together."
I'm certainly not a proponent of Amazon, but I'm not seeing Amazon being the major problem here. Granted, I would not be unhappy for them to ban AI-generated content but how would they identify and block it without entrapping authors who write their own stuff?
