Human beings industrialized books without technological assistance from the future.
The Library of Congress describes Edward Stratemeyer’s syndicate as a mass producer of children’s fiction by 1905. The operation used invented series concepts, ghostwriters, and shared pseudonyms to produce books including The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and The Bobbsey Twins. Readers saw Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene on the cover; behind the name was a production system.
That does not make every packaged series bad, deceptive, or interchangeable. It does demolish the claim that scalable, formula-driven, multi-worker book production was invented when generative AI arrived. Publishing has long included packagers, work-for-hire writers, shared universes, dictated manuscripts, house names, editorial templates, and extremely commercial decisions made by people in actual trousers.
Use the right accusation.
If a publisher underpays writers, hides material facts from customers, steals work, misuses a person’s identity, or floods a marketplace with defective products, name the conduct and show the evidence. “Book mill” can be a useful description of a production structure; it is not a magic incantation that proves the technology used or the ethics of every participant.
The useful questions are who performed the labor, who received credit, what customers were told, who owned the rights, and whether the product met the promise. History is inconvenient that way. It keeps supplying context after the internet has already selected a villain.