How is AI Affecting the Quantity and Quality of New Books?

For those of us who live in the world of editing, writing, and publishing, the ability of the newest generations of AI tools to produce rivers of grammatically correct prose is a deep shock. But is there actual evidence on AI and the quality of published work? Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel offer a starting point in their research paper, “AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books?” (NBER Working paper 34777, May 2026, also available here). The obvious questions here are how to measure quantity and especially quality of new books. Quantity is easier. The authors offer some highly suggestive evidence: “Using data on new books offered for sale at Amazon, we document that the number of new titles appearing each month nearly tripled between 2022 and late 2025 and rose by a factor of nearly ten in some categories; and the increase in new titles 2022-2025 coincides with both the diffusion of LLMs and the incidence of detected AI in…