Everybody Wants to Write a Novel. Nobody Wants to Read One.

David Baldacci spent three decades building a career as one of the best-selling thriller writers alive. And every time he publishes a new novel, three AI-generated "companion books" appear on Amazon the same day.

In a recent interview, Baldacci described it plainly: "They're companion books to my book that say 'oh, you don't need to read Baldacci's book. We'll tell you everything that's in the book right here in a really summarized form so you can read it in like 30 minutes instead of reading his novel.'"

Looking past Baldacci's righteous indignation, I'd like to talk about the impulse of a person who spends money on a companion book. Someone who would rather pay money to spend a mere 30 minutes skimming a novel summary instead of reading the actual novel. Let's all try not to vomit while we envision the multitudes of supposed "readers" who looked at the existence of a new David Baldacci thriller and thought: I wish there was a way to read this without actually reading it.

The companion books wouldn't exist if there weren't a market for them. And be assured, there is a market.

The Companion Book Racket

The "companion book" industry for fiction is exactly what it sounds like. Someone uses AI to generate a summary of a newly released novel, slaps a cover on it, uploads it to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform, and prices it just low enough that an inattentive buyer might grab it instead of, or alongside, the real thing. These products are filed under categories like "study guides" or "biographies" to claim fair use protection, even though their entire commercial purpose is to divert sales from the actual book.

The pipeline feeding this industry is the KDP side-hustle community, which has produced roughly 90,000 TikTok tutorials on generating passive income through constant AI publishing. These are aspiring passive-income entrepreneurs who often have the nerve to call themselves authors while pumping out a 40-page PDF about someone else's book.

Amazon's own content guidelines technically prohibit companion books based on copyrighted works without permission from the copyright holder. But enforcement is reactive, not proactive. The burden falls on the author to police the listings personally in a store that processes 1.4 million self-published titles per year.

For nonfiction, you can at least argue that a summary serves a legitimate research function. But for a thriller? A literary novel? A mystery? The experience of reading the book is the entire point. You can tell someone the detective figures it out in chapter twelve, but you haven't given them the experience of getting there. You've just ruined the surprise.

So who's buying these things? Amazon doesn't publish those breakdowns and the companion books operate in a gray market, so we're not really sure. But the answer, circumstantially, is obvious: people who want to talk about books without reading them (like "bookish" content creators, hypothetically). People who want to seem well-read as part of their manufactured identity are another category, who treat fiction as content to be consumed and referenced rather than experienced.

Forty Percent of Your Target Audience... Isn't

In 2025, 40% of American adults did not read a single book. The median American read two. A YouGov survey found that 19% of American adults did 82% of the country's reading. A University of Florida study found that daily leisure reading has declined over 40% in the past two decades.