Spammers Discover Kindle Self-Publishing 122
innocent_white_lamb writes "Make it easy to self-publish books and the spammers will be right along too. Amazon's Kindle marketplace has been deluged by low-quality 'books' selling for 99 cents each. '[Thousands of ebooks published each month] are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book. These ebooks are listed for sale – often at 99 cents – alongside more traditional books on Amazon’s website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want. Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word.'"
Re:It's a problem for the "how to" crowd (Score:5, Interesting)
Another option is to require ISBNs for ebooks, which would dramatically increase the cost of submitting twenty books a day. Though they'd need some method of verifying that the ISBN is real.
ISBNs aren't really well suited to electronic publishing. For example, I write nonfiction books and distribute them for free digitally. People can also buy them in print. In the electronic versions, it's natural that if I find an error, I just want to go ahead and fix it right away. But when you have an ISBN for a book, you're supposed to throw it away and get a new ISBN when you make any change whatsoever to the book. ISBNs are also basically a scam. Bowker runs a database and charges people significant amounts of money to generate a new 500-byte database record.
From the comments I'm seeing, it sounds like the real problem is that amazon's book-reviewing system doesn't work very well on kindle books. Seems like they should just fix that problem. The one for print books seems to work reasonably well these days. You do get dishonest behavior (professors getting their grad students to write reviews, individuals posting 10 reviews a day, every day), but by and large it seems to work pretty well.
Re:Not So Bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
And it would all be solved if Amazon charged a $20 listing fee per title. It's a token amount of money that's easy to get back if you're selling a legitimate book. It's a huge amount of money that's impossible to get back if you're trying to game the system by selling public domain content.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What's price got to do with it.. (Score:2, Interesting)
As an author who likes to keep his kids fed and sheltered, I do NOT have a problem with someone reading my stuff for free (even if they 'stole' it), AS LONG AS if they like it, they'll tell someone else (preferably someone who might actually pay for a copy) about it, and maybe buy the occasional copy (paper or e) themselves.
I don't mind giving free samples (legit or not) to gain an audience. I do object to other people making money* off my work without giving me a cut.
*('money' in this context doesn't even necessarily mean cash -- someone running a pirate site just for grins is getting something (egoboo, whatever, but more likely ad revenue) out of it that he's not sharing with the authors.)