Experienced foragers worry that the new wave of foraging guides produced by artificial intelligence provide misleading—even dangerous—information to novice foragers, and lack details on how to harvest in an ecologically responsible way.
This is what people don’t get. Information is always unreliable when not from a trusted source. Just because it’s easier to generate that kind of information now doesn’t mean it’s a new problem.
This is what real foraging guides look like. If the cover doesn't look like this you've got to go and look up the author and their bonafides before trusting anything in their book. If you're new to foraging, you should be bringing a few books or guides with you for cross referencing and confirmation of species.
That is such a great book too. David Arora also does a field guide called Mushrooms Demystified. The cover is a lot more what you would expect for a mushroom field guide, though
Amazon is making their cut. They literally do not care.
I've written reviews and tried to find ways to report listings where people were selling grills with galvanized grates. Cooking on or in something galvanized can kill you. It's extremely hazardous. But Amazon doesn't care. Nothing ever happens.
I think 95% of the books on "how to get rich quick" are essentially variations on the theme "write a guide on how to get rich and sell it to other people"
I had a friend in high school that every week came with the new "money solution" found on a forum called "warrior", and he tried to crowndfund as much as possible in the class to pay for it... And in the end was something super simple like "sell this guide to others" or simply stupid like "go outside a stadium during a sport event and set an illegal face painting kiosk" or "do dropshipping on ebay using an Amazon prime trial account"
While a nicely-bound blank book with heavy paper isn't worth $500, it isn't entirely worthless, either. To really rip buyers off, it has to be an ebook or print-on-demand. As has already been demonstrated.
Ya, it should be 3 books a week, or even a month, imo.
I do see how someone could publish 3 books in a day, by releasing a full trilogy all together. But beyond that, you really are only looking at people making utter garbage.
Well amazon's quality control is automated. So we have algorithms approving books written by algorithms, sold to humans who die as a result of the bad information. They're ganging up on us! Lol
And of course, we learned during covid that the general public are just great at looking after their personal health by picking good sources for their health information.
"The Forager's Harvest" is one of the best guidebooks out there for foraging. Those titles are insidiously close, and can easily trick people who aren't paying enough attention.
Here, finally, is the true advantage of a physical bookstore. You can flip through a book and tell right away that it is AI generated crap if you have even a small amount of domain knowledge.