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Kindle spam
I didn't see any earlier threads talking about this, but perhaps I just missed them. There are a number of stories about kindle spam, i.e. people gaming the kindle store to sale ebooks where they are not the writer.
This practice has really limited the value of the kindle store at Amazon for me. When I try to browse by date to see what's new, I end up going through three to five pages of spam ebooks before I get to any that might be of interest to me. I use Amazon when I'm looking for a specific title or author, but Sony when I am browsing to see what is new. Of course, Sony made the business decision to manage the catalog in house while Amazon made the business decision to push the management of the catalog to those who are trying to sale the books.
It will be interesting to see how Amazon decides to solve this problem. I can see them putting out a free catalog and then a vetted catalog when the publisher has to pay a fee to be included.
I can also see various people stepping into the void and creating web sites that list various categories, with "what's new" sections, reviews, author interviews and the like using links back to Amazon to let you buy the books, just like some of the old publisher's news letters from a number of years ago.
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