Amazon faces a spam attack
As if spam wasn鈥檛 bad enough in our email, now it鈥檚 on our virtual bookshelf.
The Kindle bookstore is clogged with junk listings that are 鈥渇ar from being book-worthy,鈥� . Reuters calls the onslaught 鈥渢he dark side of an online revolution that's turning the traditional publishing industry on its head by giving authors new ways to access readers directly.鈥�
The spam-books are generally reformatted information that鈥檚 either purchased cheaply on line or reworked from free online content. Ironically, said Reuters, the problem has worsened in recent months due to online courses and ebooks teaching people how to put up a new Kindle 鈥渂ook鈥� every day. Amazon vets its 鈥淜indle Singles鈥�, but doesn鈥檛 have a similarly strong program in place for the self-publishing store, . (A defender on points out that not all cheaply purchased materials reformatted to make a buck are junk. Also, not every email from Nigeria is a scam.)
Some spam booksellers,, 鈥渟imply co-opt the name of a well-known author to attach to their books, and if he's no longer alive to defend himself, even better: the prolific e-book author Manuel Ortiz Braschi sells a version of 'Pursuit' by Lester Del Rey, who died in 1993, which Braschi claims to have edited.鈥�
Commenters on the Ars Technica site jumped in with potential remedies: One poster suggested a refundable deposit, 鈥渞eturnable against revenue. Any legitimate author is going to recoup that quite quickly, but those listing thousands of books will find it prohibitively expensive.鈥� Another suggested red-flagging any account submitting more than one Kindle book per week, so that a human could at least look over those books for problems. Another suggested running all new submissions through a plagiarism-detecting site like .
Nice to see a modern boon 鈥� crowdsourcing 鈥� come up with such smart ideas for combating a modern bane.
Seattle writer Rebekah Denn blogs at
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