Fire Alarms Systems

Via Slashdot, we learn that spammers have the ability to publish cheap "ebooks" discovered:

Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense.

Instead, they 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 - in addition to more traditional books on Amazon's Web site, forcing readers plow through many more titles to find what they want.

The article makes it sound like it's a big problem, called "the dark side" publish myself, but I don 't get it. Assuming no one wants this crap seems, it is likely that Amazon will start to filter out the search results or top lists.

There is some slightly more legitimate concern about outright plagiarism, where some of these "spammers" are merely copying other books and then re-branding them and selling them as ebooks. But, once again, this seems like a filter problem more than anything else. In fact, I'm a bit surprised that Amazon doesn't do a basic check to make sure the content of an ebook hasn't already been offered by someone else, and do a further investigation if that's the case. Others have suggested that Amazon charge a small fee to upload a book, as that might prevent spammers from going crazy with such copies, and that could make sense as well. I just have trouble believing that this is such a serious "problem" that it can't easily be stopped.

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