Quote:
Originally Posted by Belfaborac
I had a quick look at some of the product descriptions and they all stated: "This book consists of articles from Wikia" or "This book consists of articles from Wikia or other free sources online". Sounds pretty clear to me.
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In large part that's what made me lose interest. They are covering themselves.
But if I search for "balverine" (a creature from the game Fable) on amazon.co.uk one of these books is about the fourth or fifth entry - fair enough, it's not a popular term. If I search for "balverine" on amazon.com there are none of these scraped books. So, the .com is doing something the .co.uk isn't - and that's what still kinda ticks me off.
A search for "halo guide" has one on the second page of results, but the description is nonsense and it's priced at £14.50 for a 40 page book. I don't expect many people to buy these, and if they do presumably they can return them under Amazon's typical returns policy.
This one even got a four star review from a confused parent:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Minute-A...467189&sr=1-39
Or how about this review from a granny:
"The book was fine though a little slim for the money. My grandson thought it okay and Amazon was the only place I could get it." - ten quid for a forty page book scraped off a Spyro the Dragon wiki.
It's a bit like spam - it doesn't take many idiots to buy these for it to be profitable for the companies to do it. I simply think amazon.co.uk should be doing more about it - I've seen independent authors complain about the difficulties associated with adhering to amazon's terms and conditions, yet companies like this have no trouble getting crap like this listed? Jeeze.
This all relates back to the ebook bubble we were discussing a few weeks back.
Anyway, going to stop thinking about it, because it's annoying me.