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.'"

Comments

Oh Joy!

[WrongSizeGlass]

It looks like I'll spend more time reading Amazon's book listings than reading books I download!

Re:B&N FTW?

[RivenAleem]

Brick and Nortar?

Android

[Aladrin]

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.)

It's a problem for the "how to" crowd

[beadfulthings]

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.

Re:It's a problem for the "how to" crowd

[0123456]

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.

Shouldn't they have sued Amazon for copyright infringement?

I know Smashwords rejects PLR books and does a web search for copied text in submitted books. Amazon are probably going to have to start doing something similar.

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.

Re:It's a problem for the "how to" crowd

[bcrowell]

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:But it is really spam?

[athmanb]

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.

Re:Get Rich Quick!

[slater.jay]

Humanity fucking disgusts me most of the time.

Well, we have to reproduce somehow.

Not So Bad...

[ideonexus]

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.

Re:Not So Bad...

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Not So Bad...

[Herkum01]

You would not even have to charge a fee, just a deposit that is returned when you have sold enough books. That would filter out spammers and real authors could get their money back after selling a few titles.

Re:Not So Bad...

[dgatwood]

A fee would put Amazon in the subsidy or vanity publishing category -- not pleasant company for indie authors like myself who have sold through traditional publishing too.

Not any more so than they already are. If you're selling through a traditional publisher, then they are paying the fee to list the book. If we're talking about selling eBooks out-of-band, then they're already basically a vanity publishing service, and I fail to see how charging a listing fee is any different than them taking a cut of the profit in that regard.

Besides, I'm not talking about charging a $2,000 editing fee and a $5,000 publishing fee. I'm talking about charging a listing fee that's just large enough to ensure that you're unlikely to break even if you are flooding the market with crap, but small enough that anybody selling a legit book even at a couple of dollars apiece will make it up in no time flat.

Re:All the more reason to pirate books

[0123456]

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.

Re:Business Class Anecdote

[mwvdlee]

But it isn't true.
I'll proof it.
Send me a dollar and I promise you, you'll recieve nothing in return.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:bussiness paln

[Anne Thwacks]

In days of old, when knights were bold, and women weren't invented...

(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!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What's price got to do with it..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)