Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Discover Kindle Self-Publishing
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.'"
It looks like I'll spend more time reading Amazon's book listings than reading books I download!
spammers doing generated 'autobiographies'. of famous people.
like the untold story of michael jackson or sarah palin or richard stallman and how their success came to be with the help of vizagara and nigerian banks
Or second post. Spam or scam? You be the judge.
--mdsolar
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
I've got a book coming out telling people how to make money by publishing books about making money by publishing books about making money by publishing books on Kindle, without writing a word.
Amazon needs to run submitted eBooks through TurnItIn to check for plagiarism. Otherwise, they're involved in copyright infringement for profit, which is a felony in the US.
Kindles marketplace is plagued with low-quality books alright; but price is almost irrelevant. And the review/recommendation system so broken/spammed-out that it's an irrelevance.
Nice idea; nice hardware; nice software; shame about the wetware really...
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
By being a grade A asshole and 'monetizing' one more little bit of human trust!
Make the lives of tens of thousands of strangers just that little bit worse!
It's all money in your pocket! Call now and get our bonus DVD on cold calling your own grandparents!
Humanity fucking disgusts me most of the time.
I took a Business Law class back in high-school. The teacher told a funny get rich story.
"There was a sign on a telephone poll that said 'If you want to learn how to get rich, mail me a dollar and I will tell you my secrets'. The poster had been there for weeks, and the house listed in the address field was a beautiful mansion. I sent in a dollar for grins, and about 3 weeks later got a note back that simply said 'Do what I do.'"
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Time to switch back to B&N?
Reasons to pirate books
*No DRM.
*No idiotic geographical restrictions.
*No limited platform support.
*No ridiculous higher-than-hardback prices.
and now
*Nobody bothers to pirate spam.
Honestly, the ebook industry needs to stop trying to be like the music industry of the 90's. Pirated ebooks are a superior product to legal ones in most ways, just as pirated mp3s were superior to DRM-encumbered music formats, and as long as that's the case, the industry is going to struggle. I have many DRMed Microsoft Reader and Palm Reader books that I can't read on any modern ebook reader (without the hassle of trying to decrypt and convert them, at any rate), and I've had enough of that; I won't spend another penny on ebooks until they're DRM-free and sensibly priced.
It's a lot like old books that are public domain. It's clutter, to be sure, but there is actual information that some people might want to read or purchase, even in these things.
I'd pay 99 cents for a manual that told me how to fix the roof on my house. Or how to handle some legal issue. Having it downloaded to my e-reader when I need it versus having to go to the local library and look through their stacks is well worth the convenience fee.
This sounds more like a bunch of traditional authors are whining about how they are being drowned out by the competition. Well, hello... you have to do more than let your latest novel sit there like a lump. It's called a business, and they need to market their books just the same as local businesses do. (ie - most authors' models to date has been akin to placing an ad in the local phone book and waiting for people to call you)
Barnes and Noble has the same problem with their Nook store. It's flooded with tons of "books" about how to get Angry Birds for free. They masquerade as the app itself, but all it turns out to be is instructions on rooting your Nook Color. There's a boat load of these things on there that have different deceptive titles such as "Free Brain and Puzzle Apps for Android", but are the same basic crap you can get for free with a google search. It makes finding real content a pain in the butt. The computer category is near useless to browse.
1) generate some book-length text using a markov chain generator ...
2) slap some title that makes it look attractive, luring buyers
3)
4) profit?
Bonus stage: if someone challenges the authenticity your book, you can say its a rather profound work on deconstructing concretism. That could make your book even more popular.
I saw something similar on the Android market... I was looking for a certain app, and I found it... But I also found like 20 other apps that were nearly identical. (Source is GPL.) The other apps had names like 'Bear App' and 'Tiger App' and had a picture of the animal, but the actual app and description were identical, except the name. And they did the same thing as the one I was looking for. I searched for another similar app and found the same thing there, too!
So they flood the market with apps in an attempt to be the one that gets bought. When there's 20 choices and you published 19 of them, it sounds like a good bet. (In reality, I avoided it because it looked scammy.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
This book is just one chapter of the original book, they published it calling it "Volume 1" and nowhere specifying that this is actually "Chapter 1". What reason could there be for this other than rip off the readers?
http://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Planet-Space-Elevator-ebook/dp/B0049H94Q6
I'm trying to learn more about how soap (the kind you wash with) is made, and I ran a search for Kindle stuff. It returned a huge number of publications. The first twenty or so were standard books published by legitimate publishers and available in various print formats as well. Those were followed by hundreds of 99 cent pieces. I got curious and had a look at the very few reviews--they all said things like, "DON'T BUY THIS" or "SCAM" or "I WANT MY MONEY BACK." There was one plaintive message from some poor soul on the West Coast who writes a blog on the subject--the "book" in question had simply gone into her blog and lifted posts out of it. Oddly enough, all those hundreds of publications shared the same three or four front cover images. I haven't really seen this in the arena of novels. Most of the cheap ones there look like people trying to vanity-publish their own work--so if you buy a novel, you get a novel. It just may not be a very good novel.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Piss on 'em. I think I'm the last person left who still boycotts Amazon over the one-click patent.
I still boycott DVDs too, but my reasons for doing that have grown far beyond the CSS debacle they started with.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
the only word in your book should be: "Whoosh!"
I've switched almost exclusively to Audible. Audio books, especially when read by the author, convey so much more. Those are, and won't, be automated. Sure, text to speech can read you a McDonald's menu. But It'll never compete with the "feeling" put behind words, because you have to understand "what" your reading before you put such feeling in. Get the free "Go the F--k to Sleep" 6 min audio book narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. No simple text to speech will ever do that.
I expect no automated spam there. I wish I could require all of my email contacts to send voice notes.
I8-D
The true purpose of publishers is to collect useful content together in a convenient place.
Unfortunately, contemporary publishers have forgotten their purpose--the useful content is hidden between piles of spam, and the publishers seem to think that they're in the business of selling "rights".
In Amazon's defense, in my experience the company has done a pretty good job of correcting matters when fraudulent ebooks are put online. I downloaded a $0.99 ebook about, ironically, publishing ebooks, which turned out to be total nonsense. I notified Amazon, the book was delisted, and my account credited. I do get upset when I see public domain books listed for $0.99, when they are just ripped from Project Gutenberg and posted, but again, Amazon seems to do a good job of providing many public domain titles for free as well.
As a self-published author on Amazon, I can say that this seems like an extremely inefficient way to make money. I list my books at $0.99, meaning I have to sell 100 or so of them before I get a $10 royalty check. Self-published books like these don't get as much exposure in the Amazon search engine (I can literally only find my books on Amazon if I search my name). So this seems like spammers taking a whole lot of time and effort to achieve a very tiny payoff, if their efforts don't get them delisted from the site anyway.
But, then again, the same is true of spam emails and spam websites... an obnoxious waste of effort for little payoff, but generates a whole lot of resentment from the online community.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
I absolutely love Amazon. It's my go-to site for new books and music (at least for a preliminary search, and often for purchase). All these crappy Kindle books, though, are annoying. You can limit your search to "real" books only, which I do, but a very similar problem has arisen there: self-publishing.
I search for "Beowulf", for example, and get loads of self-published copies of the same god damned public domain translation. I don't give two hoots about people's self-published shit. I would love to be able to tell Amazon to restrict my search to major publishing houses only (or if that's possible, I'd like it to be easier to find!). I don't care that there will be a gem or two among the self-published stuff. The overflow of public domain books is enough to make me tear my hair out.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/03/2112203/Print-On-Demand-Publisher-VDM-Infects-Amazon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Someone please post the address, I am very interested in this offer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion