Come to think of it, probably at least twice as many by now. Even more, if growth has not been linear ...

as the beginning of the article says: it all depends on what qualifies as a book

if you're including epub novels, that have never had a print done... then yeah, at least is gonna be the operating word, likely multiple times considering just how many fiction books are being produced on webnovel sites and then published as epubs for their fans to buy and support the author.

It also depends on what qualifies as 'published'. If a bot generates 100 nonsensical children's books with an LLM, lists them all on Amazon, and then takes them down a day later before anyone notices any of them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40779643), then were they ever really published?

I - ignorantly - wonder what the whole point of that might be? - they cannot possibly sell that many in the intervening time ...

Padding numbers? ‘Our shitty bot has successfully* published* hundreds of books!’

That is awful. (Though you are probably entirely correct ...)

(The only one's benefiting from that are the slop "shovels" purveyors to the AI-slop gold rush ...)