When I write a book, I buy more books.

Every time, I end up buying a dozen or more books so I can see what is already in print, cite what is citable, and check whether an idea I think is original already has been written by someone else.

I feel scammed

That habit just cost me more than $100. I am not going to name the book. The title is not the point. If the only way this post is useful to you is a blacklist of one ISBN, you are already shopping for DFIR books the wrong way.

In brief, I found online a DFIR book with a title that was so enticing to me, from a first time author, with promises and claims so big, that I had to buy it and rush shipped it to read it right away.

Turns out, from the front to the back cover, this hundred dollar book has every telltale sign of being almost entirely “written” by GenAI. I say “almost entirely” to give the “author” benefit of the doubt of maybe having original ideas to prompt AI.

I am not complaining about the three-dollar book

I recently went through 400 DFIR books for a previous post. In that pile, and in the buying I do around my own writing, the Kindle Unlimited / few-dollar DFIR books are easy to categorize. At that price I expect GenAI. You pay a few bucks, you get a few bucks worth of a book. I am not angry at those “books.” I am not recommending it either. I cancelled my subscription purely because of those AI mass produced books.

But that $100 book sold under a human name is a different thing. It steals trust we used to give print, academic presses, and people who claim to be experts. Some of the claims in the book I bought are not matters of tone or lived experience. They are flat out wrong and easily proven false. As a side note, when I opened the book, pages were falling out….even the physical quality mirrored the AI output.

I won’t name this book even though I want to, because I can’t prove GenAI wrote it. That’s my opinion based on the “it’s not X, but Y” sentence structure on most pages, plus so many other tells. Even the word “polished” is used more than a few times. Am I the only one who uses “polished” sarcastically? It’s the new lipstick on a pig.

The shelf is no longer scarce

In the Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel NBER Working Paper 34777 (AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products, January 2026), the researchers found that monthly Amazon ebook releases grew from roughly 100,000 before widespread LLM use to more than 300,000 by late 2025. Books containing detectable AI made up more than half of 2025 releases. Not books ABOUT Artificial Intelligence. These are books WRITTEN by Artificial Intelligence. More than one of those are DFIR books…

Bad DFIR information has consequences

If you do not know what is true, you can spend hours reading made-up information that sounds right and looks right, but is slightly not right if not completely wrong.

In DFIR that can cost you a skill or a case. We testify and write reports other people will attack. They will attack your work when you are not in the room and attack it right in front of you.

For the AI-Generated books, the author line should be the LLM model. The other name on the cover is just the person selling it. I’m serious about that.

How I buy now

I hesitate to say this in public because it sounds like a personality quirk. It’s about attribution. Attribution is everything. If someone writes a DFIR book and I cannot find that person online as a DFIR person, I am not buying that book unless there is some other information that leads me to believe the book and author are legit.

One title I reviewed in the 400+ book analysis was written by someone who also published a cooking book, a self-help book, a photography book, and a dozen other unrelated DFIR topics, all published in one year. That’s a busy LLM. Others have managed to put out a series of DFIR books that are, start to finish, AI slop.

In the before-times, DFIR information was limited and it was easier to figure out who created it. You could argue with the author (if you wanted, and they could argue back if they wanted). And you could check whether they had ever sat in the hot seat. You could find their name somewhere in the field writing or teaching or doing or have done.

That still works but it’s harder with AI inundating us with prompt outputs being sold as books.

Unrelated but related, I am seeing so many DFIR websites clearly designed by GenAI selling new forensic applications, also clearly developed by GenAI. Most of those I have seen have no person’s name behind them.

• Strike 1 - GenAI designed and developed (not just a little, but practically all).

• Strike 2 - Unknown person/s behind it. Some with gmail as the contact!

• Strike 3 - No indication or notice of testing or usage. I’m not putting my money or case anywhere near that.

You need ten minutes to find your DFIR book

1. Search the author without the book title. Do you find DFIR casework, a lab, prior books practitioners actually use, teaching, testimony, or a commonly used tool? Or do you find a thin bio (or no bio!), or maybe a stack of other titles unrelated to DFIR?

2. Open the sample. Does any paragraph sound like someone suffered through a deposition, or sweated a tool failure or a case failure? Or is it definitions, “in today’s digital landscape,” and “it’s not X but Y?”

3. Check the claims you can check in five minutes. If the book is already wrong on something basic and consequential, the rest is not going to make up for it.

4. Ask the question that matters: Is this information from the author’s actual experience?

If the answer to that last one is no, do not put it in your head either.

The point

I am not trying to run a takedown of one title or one hundred thousand titles. Next month there will be more.

My advice is simpler than a list of books to avoid: Be wary of where you get your DFIR knowledge.

As for me, I first check the name that I want to learn from, whether it is their words on paper or microphone. Everything else is secondary.