The author read too much sci-fi. But too little at the same time.

The problem is never we don't have enough ideas. It's how to find the good ones among the sea of ideas. Most of ideas that eventually prove right sounded very stupid at first. Selling books online? Pff.

By the way, Liu (the author of The Three-Body Problem, who popularized the concept of "Dark Forest") has a short story about exactly that, Cloud of Poems. Unfortunately it's never translated into English.