This short news piece was in Shelf Awareness today with a link to the full Reuters article, which is worth reading. It was rather startling, but it shouldn't have been.
A flood of e-book spam "that is far from being book worthy" is clogging the online bookstore of the Kindle e-reader, with thousands of e-books "being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month,"
Reuters reported, adding: "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."
Internet marketing specialist Paul Wolfe said one popular tactic involves copying an e-book that has started selling well and republishing it with new titles and covers to appeal to a slightly different demographic, Reuters wrote.
"It's getting to be a more widespread problem," said Susan Daffron, president of Logical Expressions. "Once a few spammers find a new outlet like this, hoards of them follow. Amazon will definitely have to do more quality control, unless they want the integrity of their products to drop."
L.J.