06-17-2011, 10:12 AM | #1 |
Novelist
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E-book scams rise (buying or stealing content)
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. |
06-17-2011, 10:32 AM | #2 |
eBook Enthusiast
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PLR is scarcely a new phenomenon - it's been around for years.
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06-17-2011, 10:44 AM | #3 |
Wizard
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This is one area where traditional publishing offered some safeguards.
It's possible that this can really harm the credibility of indie published works, miring them in a sort of black market populated with "fakes" and so forth. People may stop trusting (or be leery of) ebooks not stamped with the name of a big publisher. |
06-17-2011, 11:02 AM | #4 |
Spork Connoisseur
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Unless it comes as a recommendation from friends/family/some of you kind folks here, I tend to avoid indie published works. I had the horse-blinders on about PLR, though. Having read up on it now...I've heard about the process, but I wasn't aware what it was called Private Label Rights.
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06-17-2011, 11:05 AM | #5 |
Feral Underclass
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"forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want"
Necessary evil if you want to liberate publishing and allow more diversity in what we are allowed to read. I would have thought people would know how to sort the cream from the scum by now. |
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06-17-2011, 12:07 PM | #6 |
Kate
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Nothing new. I've been chasing down websites that have stolen my content ever since I became involved in ebooks - long before the Kindle popularized them.
It's like playing whack-a-mole on an infinite grid, sometimes. |
06-17-2011, 01:15 PM | #7 | |
Wizard
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Sounds like this 1995 story.
Quote:
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06-17-2011, 01:35 PM | #8 | |
monkey on the fringe
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Quote:
a frog sat on a log and wished he was a dog in the middle of a bog with a sky full of fog then went for a jog on a hog |
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06-17-2011, 02:42 PM | #9 | |
Kate
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Quote:
While I have had a few sites steal my original short stories, mostly what gets stolen are the PD books I formatted for esspc-ebooks.com How I catch them is they steal the descriptions, too. I Google myself, and when I find 'Kate Halleron contributed this book', then I know where they stole it from. |
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06-19-2011, 01:54 AM | #10 |
Grand Sorcerer
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It's how some Urban Legends get around and mutate as well I think. Someone tells the story and it gets around, vanishes for a while and then comes back with a twist or two here and there.
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06-19-2011, 03:52 AM | #11 |
Guru
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06-19-2011, 03:56 AM | #12 |
eBook Enthusiast
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One could claim a typographical copyright on formatting of a public domain work. This lasts for 25 years from the date of publication of your version of the book.
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06-19-2011, 04:03 AM | #13 |
Wizard
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Maybe the Amazon ebook offering that was taken and "re-published" has a price attached?
I might be a little pissed if someone was profiting from my hours of donated work. Luck; Ken |
06-19-2011, 09:05 AM | #14 | ||
Kate
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Quote:
Quote:
I'm not claiming copyright, but my work was donated to esspc-ebooks.com - no one has the right to profit from my labor (or Ken Mattern's) without my (our) permission. It would be the same as if someone were taking books from the MR library and selling them on Amazon without alteration. There might not be a legal recourse, but telling people to knock it off is perfectly legitimate. |
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06-19-2011, 09:19 AM | #15 |
Wizard
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I think that it might be wiser to educate the buyers. I mean people eventually got the point that clicking on the bright red "Congratulations! You are our 1,000,000th visitor" button, so eventually they might get the point that they should look at the source of a book, even if it is sold by Amazon.
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Tags |
ebooks, piracy, scam, spam |
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