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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!
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.
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
TFS said the spammer/scammers buy the stuff with copyright under the "PLR."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Brick and Nortar?
Already done. Books LLC and Alphascript do these print-on-demand "books" taken from Wikipedia, charging $50 a copy. Reusing WIkipedia content is fine - that's what it's there for, make a zillion bucks, knock yourself out - but they need to make it a little clearer where this stuff comes from.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Copyright law only applies to people who are too poor to defend themselves in court. Amazon has more than enough money to cover that felony, and I doubt any publishers with a large enough war-chest to actually push the case would intentionally shit on the revenue stream they get selling through amazon.
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
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
rtfa
People don't write 20 books a day about how to fix your roof (and if someone did write a book on how to fix a roof, he wouldn't sell it for a dollar).
What they do is run a web spider, aggregate random blog text found on Google by whatever search term is popular that week, apply some automated formatting then sell the results. Then spam their own ratings with bots.
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.
You still have to deal with the signal to noise level. Back in the day when email boxes would fill with spam, maybe there would have been a nugget or two in there that might have been useful, but I never would have seen it because of the rest of the crap. Amazon might have to deal with this in some manner so that potential customers don't get buried in crap as well or they'll stop using their service.
the only word in your book should be: "Whoosh!"
Would some other plagiarism checks work, or is TurnItIn the only one with legal muster?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
A lot of the ones I've seen come up appear to be straight copies of wikipedia articles (sometimes even crediting wikipedia).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Your experience with ebooks is obviously quite limited... I have a Kobo ebook reader, and my uses have not been hindered by DRM on the books. The book store ties in with Smashwords and Gutenberg, so there's a very large selection of free books available, there's no geographical or language restrictions, and most ebooks on the store are cheaper than the paperback.
Amazon and Sony treat their customers like criminals. But it's downright naive to believe that every player in the game does.
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
Amazon and Sony treat their customers like criminals. But it's downright naive to believe that every player in the game does.
Amazon aren't the ones putting DRM on ebooks: the publishers are. And even many people working for the publishers have said that DRM is moronic but the people at the top demand it.
Most ebooks on Amazon are DRM-free. Of course most ebooks on Amazon are either unreadable self-published novels (I'd say about 1% are worth reading) or spam.
By pirating books you're telling the publishers that the demand is there but the DRM isn't strong enough. From their perspective you're pirating books not because you dislike DRM, but because you don't want to pay for that book. To the publishers that means that even if they were to strip out DRM you'd go right on pirating books.
If you really have a problem with DRM stop reading that publisher's books. That means no pirating. That's a real statement. And it shows you're principled.
Otherwise I agree with you; I have a strong dislike of DRM. The various restrictions are inexcusable and I don't like being chained to a device. But some of your claims don't make a lot of sense.
I've never seen any ebook that was more expensive than paperback, let alone hardcover. Just because a book is electronic doesn't mean it should be sold at a significant discount. The printing cost for any black and white book is insignificant. It's considerably more expensive to print color, because of both the process and paper stock. But even then, it's not close to being the majority of the price of a book. So there's no reason for a huge price difference from physical to electronic.
I also fail to see what spam has to do with piracy in this particular instance.
A nice detail is the "Forward" by Arty Clark.
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But some of your claims don't make a lot of sense. I've never seen any ebook that was more expensive than paperback, let alone hardcover.
Go to Amazon, look up "Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life" (my daughter just got a Kindle and chews through stuff like this). Hardback - $7.79 (Used $5.49) Kindle $9.99. Much of the young adult stuff is like this, it's crazy pricing. Right now, she's reading Alice in Wonderland and some of the other free classics, and this fall Amazon is supposed to add library epub support. We're not going to be buying a whole lot of ebooks this summer.
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Too bad there is no 'moron' mod point for you.
Good-bye
You can thank Apple for that price.
(no, I'm not joking).
(sorry, wrong e-book)
A long time ago, I wrote a Fortran program which did this. We fed it the manuals for the CDC7600, and then got it to print out "The CDC7600 for Dummies" - of course it made no sense, but we assured people that "Only Seymour Cray could actually understand the CDC7600 anyway", so they continued to believe!
If only I had the punched cards now!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yea, Plato, Seutonius, Tacitus, Michael Foucault, a shitload of reference and 'textbooks,' Robert Jordan, Terry G, Asimov (the list goes on) - some real spam there!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Pirates have low standards. They'll pirate Asylum movies. Though there are limits: I notice that on at least one tracker, where the new True Grit film has over a thousand downloads, Yogi Bear has seven. And no seeds. That's people who got the .torrent, not people who actually downloaded the film.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/03/2112203/Print-On-Demand-Publisher-VDM-Infects-Amazon
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"That means no pirating. That's a real statement. And it shows you're principled."
Why should I have principles handicap me when my corporate and government masters have none?
Moral "principles" involve the acceptance of personal disadvantage in hope others will do likewise. That's best kept among friends/crew/tribe. The benefits don't scale.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
They claim that they put in links to Wikipedia but Amazon removed them.
Considering Amazon, that's perfectly believable, but it still amounts to "Amazon's policies don't allow us to do this legitimately, they only let us do it as a scam". If you can only do it as a scam, then don't do it.
I'm not sure I follow. There are cheaper ebooks available on Amazon, so why would Apple have an effect on some but not all?
Well, then that's Amazon's problem with making it so easy to manipulate ratings like that. And if it really is someone else's work, then it should have to pass through a filter before being accepted.
An easy way to deal with this would be to filter out all 99 cent books and start it at 1.99, where the profit margins are actually workable for an author.