[greencat]

Spam books work in one of a few ways. Either you start with an existing Private Label Rights book (a book that basically means the purchaser can do what they like with) and either publish it as is or alter it a little. Or you start with a collection of PLR articles and get software to select a few to make into a book around a particularly topic.

It should be said - that the results vary. You might still end up with a useful book at the end of it. Or the book might be poorly written and inaccurate (they are most often non-fiction). But if you read a lot of books in that area of interest - then you might experience a feeling of déjà vu.

Spotting the spam book isn't easy. As you might imagine, the description above could often be applied to a lot of conventional books too. But the spam books quite often have covers that look a book (ie 3D), odd reading titles or descriptions (ie keyword stuffed) or lack credibility in some way. For example, the person may be writing about a particular disease but appears to have no track record in that area. Again not a guarantee of positive identification as that could apply to conventional books too.

It's not all bad - I suspect there are a lot of unwitting yet happy purchasers of spam books. It is, after all, in the spammers best interest to ensure you don't return it. And one my long term predictions for the future is that of computer written fiction books ie all of the common tropes, 1000s of characters, descriptions for a genre are fed into a piece of software and out pops a book which might need a little human polishing. I suspect we'll see the first books of this type in the next 20 years. Perhaps Dan Brown, James Patterson and Barbara Cartland etc will still be publishing new books long after their deaths.