Garbage books on Amazon

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

I think Amazon should have incentive to clean up this mess. How much can they possibly earn on a $0.99 ebook?

More than you think. In the '70s GM decided to replace the metal oil filler cap on vehicles with a rubber stopper. The stopper was easy to take off, but a pain to get back on. GM did not care that their customers had a hard time with the caps. Why should they. fifty cents does not sound like much but adds up quickly. For every two million cars sold they saved one million dollars.
Apache

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

Want to guess how many Kindle versions of "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" are currently for sale on Amazon? Exactly 1,947. Find one that will look good on your ereader; I dare you.

Here you go: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Open Road Media)

And here's a free one: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Both have Word Wise, Page Flip, Enhanced Type-setting and so forth, though only the freebie has X-Ray as it is the one put out by Amazon.

Keep in mind, this was a grueling thirty second search on my part.

it's really not as difficult as it is made to sound. Either find a publisher you like (I like open Road Media) or sort by price.

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by haertig

I "bought" a cookbook on Amazon once. OK, it was a freebie, so I "paid" $0 for it.

Excited to download my new cookbook (not really!), I went looking for a quick dinner recipe. I went to the chicken section. Hey, this one sounded good: Delicious Sauteed Chicken Breasts. I turned to that recipe page. "Thaw chicken breasts, salt to taste, saute in frying pan over medium heat. Serve warm." Well, the few seconds it took me to download that cookbook were worth it for the laughs I got. I should go back an check out the Breakfasts section of that cookbook. I expect to find something like "Open cereal box, pour desired quantity into a bowl, add milk if desired. Serve at room temperature."

Now that you know how easy it is, you should write your own cookbook and sell it on Amazon!

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

Now that you know how easy it is, you should write your own cookbook and sell it on Amazon!

I've heard you can make millions doing so.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'm happy Gutenberg exists, but the files are a mess.

OMG, don't get me going.

You can't even get a clean volume of Shakespeare. They generate a TOC based on <h1-6> of files that are all formatted differently. I handmade a TOC so that at least you could find stuff. Gutenberg wasn't interested as it didn't conform to their work flow.

Their latest standard is that the title and the author's name appear as two separate levels in the TOC. (The example is trimmed for clarity.)

  <navMap>
    <navPoint>
      <navLabel>
        <text>Moby-Dick</text>
      </navLabel>
    </navPoint>
    <navPoint>
      <navLabel>
        <text>or,</text>
      </navLabel>
    </navPoint>
    <navPoint>
      <navLabel>
        <text>THE WHALE. by Herman Melville</text>
      </navLabel>
    </navPoint>
    <navPoint>
      <navLabel>
        <text>Contents</text>
      </navLabel>
    </navPoint>

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Apache

More than you think. In the '70s GM decided to replace the metal oil filler cap on vehicles with a rubber stopper. The stopper was easy to take off, but a pain to get back on. GM did not care that their customers had a hard time with the caps. Why should they. fifty cents does not sound like much but adds up quickly. For every two million cars sold they saved one million dollars.
Apache

At one of the Big Three auto manufacturers in the early '70s, any change that would increase the cost of making a car by 5 cents had to be signed off by a vice president.

[ekbell]

On amazon.ca setting the price from low to high turned up the AmazonClassics edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin as the first hit.

On the other hand finding a good copy of The Wizard of Oz or one of the Narnia books (out of copyright in Canada) might be a problem although sorting by price would at least garner you freebies first.

And I once picked up a free copy of some of C.S. Lewis's books through Amazon (they hadn't yet been added to fadedpage) and discovered that the publisher had added their own footnotes stating where they disagreed with Lewis. I must admit that they had ensured that their commentary was easily distinguished from Lewis's work and none of his writing had been modified but it does point out that there is more than bad formatting to beware of.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by ekbell

And I once picked up a free copy of some of C.S. Lewis's books through Amazon (they hadn't yet been added to fadedpage) and discovered that the publisher had added their own footnotes stating where they disagreed with Lewis.

That is hilarious. I’m dying.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ekbell

And I once picked up a free copy of some of C.S. Lewis's books through Amazon (they hadn't yet been added to fadedpage) and discovered that the publisher had added their own footnotes stating where they disagreed with Lewis.

Originally Posted by issybird

That is hilarious. I’m dying.

I'm imagining a "My Cousin Vinnie" sort of moment. "Everything that guy just said, is bu******!"

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ekbell

On the other hand finding a good copy of The Wizard of Oz or one of the Narnia books (out of copyright in Canada) might be a problem although sorting by price would at least garner you freebies first.

As a true genius once said:

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

It's really not as difficult as it is made to sound. Either find a publisher you like (I like open Road Media) or sort by price.

Here you go: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Open Road)

And the free one: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (AmazonClassics Edition)

[Quoth]

Also publishers now use the internal Chronology order for Narnia instead of Lewis's. It doesn't even work properly.

I find it doesn't take long to fix annoying formatting with Calibre. One exception was the complete set of Gothic novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey. Terrible formatting and OCR errors. Eventually I'll fix them all. Some are only available separately as scans.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

On Youtube I keep seeing ads from a marketer "Sophie Howard" and her amazing methods of selling crap on Amazon to become rich with a few hours of work a week.

As always, if someone knows how to do that, why aren't they just doing it instead of selling seminars telling others how to ...

One of her scams is "selling thousands of ebooks on Amazon a day, without writing a word".

So I guess she is telling other scumbags to take Project Gutenberg books or Wikipedia pages or other public domain text and automatically convert them to Kindle books and sell for $2 or the like.

One of her pages:
https://blueskyamazon.com/90-million...r-amazon-boom/
NOT AN ENDORSEMENT. In fact, the opposite.

I'd guess in reality hardly anyone makes money out of this. They do it for a few months and give up, when they find thousands of others are offering identical products. Or if they actually sell any, get so many quality complaints that Amazon cancels their account.

A few work out an algorithm to find "hot" subjects and scrape together some free text to make books that will be found by people searching for that. But that takes serious skills to keep ahead of the zeitgeist.

Probably she gets $$ from the gullible who buy her book, course, whatever and that's how she does it. There are always plenty of people who fall for get rich quick schemes, and always have been. There were the people who actually sold oils etc. from snakes and then there were the patent medicine sellers (the snake oil sellers) who promised cures for all kinds of ailments. And of course you could always buy stock in their company or some such as well as buy the actual 'medicine.' I have no doubt that many fell for such schemes back then and there are modern ones who sell all sorts of 'cures' for things even today. They don't need a horse and wagon though, instead they sell their 'products' over the internet. There may be actual ways to legally get wealthy via some sort of business online, but how can you be sure with some of them? It's not like you can be sure (assuming you can contact alleged testimonial givers) that you aren't just talking to the seller who is using a different name. Anyone can be anyone they want to be online after all.

[binaryhermit]

Originally Posted by crich70

Probably she gets $$ from the gullible who buy her book, course, whatever and that's how she does it.

There may be actual ways to legally get wealthy via some sort of business online

Is this sort of scheme necessarily even illegal? It's certainly shady as heck, but it is it even actually illegal?

[Calenorn]

Originally Posted by ekbell

And I once picked up a free copy of some of C.S. Lewis's books through Amazon (they hadn't yet been added to fadedpage) and discovered that the publisher had added their own footnotes stating where they disagreed with Lewis.

Which (if I understand correctly) is enough to allow the footnoter to copyright that particular version. Oy.

[cromag]

Another possible strategy, other than repackaging public domain books, is to sell Private Label Rights books. I've never bought one, but I was initially intrigued by the number of essentially identical books I found on any given topic when doing a search. I've seen several "authors" with boatloads of PLR books that they've priced at $2 and up. Amazon doesn't seem to have a policy on these, since I've seen loads of them there.