I note that having spammed our e-mail, scammed our snail mail, and spread Nigerian business opportunities all over the world, con artists have found a new avenue for their games. Publishing Trends reports:
Now that Google has gone after content farms, the next frontier for spammers is e-books.
This DVD set is $27.
Its creator promises it covers "EVERY single step of putting a keyword optimized book on Kindle in such an easy to understand and simple fashion that a 10 year old could do it," and recommends hiring a virtual assistant to do most of the work for you, and says he's averaged $4/book/month over the last 2.5 years.
Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Impact Media blog.
Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them - some Kindle authors have "written" thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.
Manuel Ortiz Braschi has published over 3,000 books on the Kindle Store, including public-domain titles like Alice in Wonderland. He has added 20 more in the past day.
In his blog post, Essex pointed out that readers won’t necessarily recognize whether content has been plagiarized. And if an e-book is exposed as plagiarized, the author can simply take it down and resubmit it under a new name. A bad review on one site won’t keep people from buying the same ebook on another site. And these titles are priced so low that unhappy buyers may not bother complain.
Essex carried out an experiment for PT: "I took the lyrics to the song ‘This is the song that never ends’ and repeated them over 700-plus pages. No formatting, just one continuous block of duplicate text. Within 24 hours, it was live on the Amazon Kindle Store and I haven’t received a single message from Amazon about it. Surely an automated process would be able to easily tell I had repeated myself over and over, but this wasn’t flagged up.
"It’s maddening. The logic of ‘the market will decide’ is flawed. How many customers have to be ripped off by shoddy content that adds no value before someone leaves a bad review? There’s no option to report a book as spam, and people can get away with rubbish content which dilutes the offering for good authors. I’ll continue to carry out tests until Amazon looks into this." (Amazon did not respond to our request for comment.)
There's more at the link. Those who enjoy reading (and writing) will find plenty of food for thought (and moral indignation!) in the rest of the article.
Peter
2 comments:
the market will decide,, it has, sorry to say some people are gullible and others are shysters. There is no force on earth powerful enough to discount that fact.
Gives me an idea though....
I need to write "THE" BOOK. One giant block of text, with the word "THE" written over and over and over. Surely it's worth $0.99 to somebody. And I can write my own reviews for it, praising it as insightful and noteworthy, or the only book you'll ever need.
It would go well with the "Everything Men Know About Women" book that is entirely blank from cover to cover.
Man, I need to get cracking....
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