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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.'"
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.
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
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.
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