Kindle Store awash with auto-generated crap 'books' Tsk, kids of today, eh? Give them something free and they spam it, thus making it all entirely unusable for the rest of us. As Reuters reports, this is now happening with the Kindle Store. Now that you can upload an e-book, price it and sell it, for free, hordes of wouldbe publishing millionaires are doing exactly that. Except …
Why is it that the first thought is to edit the books that get uploaded as opposed to vetting the uploaders? There are not that many people that want to publish original works or have the right to upload works of others so all Amazon has to do is to require that any uploader provide accurate and confirmed details about themselves and then if they do this it is easy enough to cut them off and remove their works.
If you say this is as bad as censorship it isn't since they can still freely publish their works in many other venues or they could use a publishing front to accomplish what they want. The point is to put in some accountability as what makes it worthwhile now is that gormless jerks can upload at will without any serious controls.
In the 18th century nefarious purveyors would sell woodchips in cheap goo as raspberry jam or bulk out other foods with all manner of crap (literally) - the solution? Branded goods that guaranteed a certain quality.
Same is true here I guess - buy a Penguin version of the book rather than a Pingreen one ....
Heh. I remember Bill Gates also said once that the solution to spam was to make email cost something. THAT did not happen for sure!
That said, I could tentatively agree that publishing a book should not be something you want to do twenty times a day, so a small charge could be justified.
This could however be an interesting experiment: How long before we get software that is able to write a new "original" book from random bits of story? After all Barbara Cartland was able to write 23 "novels" in one year using this method.
My wife recently bought a full-price ebook from the Kindle store for $13 (she admits she was a fool!). The thing was riddled not just with typos, but also lots of 'their' for 'there', etc, and every page had one or two or p>.
I am currently 'backing up' some of my crumbling paperbacks, and take the time to go through and make sure everything is the same as the original, perhaps e-publishers should do the same, and differentiate themselves from these spam books.
Whitter is right, you'd only need something as little as $10 to stop this nonsense. Small enough to avoid hurting struggling authors (they pay more than that for monthly Internet access, or even lunch on a trip to meet with those brick-and-mortar publishers they're also pitching too) but more than enough to trash the business model of the spammers.
You can find disturbingly expensive printings of articles lifted from wikipedia, eg
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-EF-Lens-Mount/dp/6130265964/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1308346109&sr=8-2
Yes, over 20 pounds for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EF_lens_mount
To add a humerous overlay to the rip-off, a number of resellers are offering the book "from stock" while others are charging print on demand prices of £30.
I pity the poor sod that has bought one of these.
Oh man, feeding from the bottom there. Wat.
I noticed something like that a while ago with Google Books, searching for the kind of obscure topics for which the Web has become rather useless thanks to Wikipedia scraper sites. I came across book after book filled with....Wikipedia scraper books. I think they shut that "publisher" out from Google Books, though.
Hooray for "free content", liberating us from the shackles of having to read the same fucking thing in just one place.
I came across a fairly expensive book on Amazon when looking for old viewdata/Prestel publications. The list of chapters was diverse and unconnected, but the couple of paragraphs of sample content matched exactly the wikipedia articles, and the pertinent chapter was the very article I'd contributed much to myself!!
Do people just browse the Kindle Store hoping to stumble across something to buy and read? When ever I go, I'm looking for a specific author or title or keyword, and I have yet to be bogged down in screeds of auto-generated spam creations. I've seen them, for sure, but they don't cripple my shopping experience any more than does looking through shelf after shelf at a dead tree store, AND I don't have to walk around a room with my head tilted to one side
One of the best things about the Kindle for me is that it's opened up a lot of new, pretty decent authors to me. Randolph Lalonde, Amanda Hocking, David Dalglish, the fantastically named David Lister and so on. All of these authors I discovered by opening up a section of the kindle store and having a wander through looking for something cheap and new.
If you stick to the samples first and then move on from there, you can actually find some very good authors out there.
I can't say I've noticed the autogenerated chaff yet either.
I've just been drilling on the free ebook thing because there are a lot of classic works I'd like to have for my Android tablet. For Android there's one called FBReader, and you set it up by going to Network Library, clicking Add catalog, and adding m.gutenberg.org. For iThings there's Stanza and you "Add Library" and choose the "Project Gutenberg" library.
Thats it, and you get all these hundreds of thousands of works in the palm of your hand, for free.
It won't sort the problem, but it could help a fair bit.
They have instituted a policy (and started actually enforcing it) that they will not accept multiple (they don't mention the limit) editions of undifferentiated public domain works.
Way back when, I was looking for a copy of Hunger (the Knut Hamsun work) and there was no decent one, so I put one together and listed it myself. It has a brand new cover, table of contents, line-breaks fixed and chapters/paragraphs reformatted and re-flowed. Pretty good edition actually, with 2 nice reviews from satisfied readers. I have recently received an email from Amazon saying that under the aforementioned policy it is to be de-listed.
To qualify to remain, I had to add something new or unique to the edition. I haven't and it will be removed (and I applaud Amazon overall for taking the step, even though in this case mine is by far one of the better editions).
It won't solve everything, sure, especially with PLR stuff, but if it is applied across the board it could vastly reduce the crap to wade through.
The solution to your delisting could be to add some biographic material about Knut Hamsun to differentiate it from others. The bio could easily be taken from Wikipedia. :-)
Seriously, I can't see this policy being very effective, as it would still be fairly easy to cut and paste from several sources to create something unique.
"She... worked on the proletarian novel-writing machines... the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'."
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell described trashy, pornographic tat novels written by machines he called "kaleidoscopes" (computers not really being widely-known at the time of writing). Here we see it again coming to fruition - machine-generated trashy "books", assembled from bits and pieces of writing in the manner of - a kaleidoscope. Albeit that the motive is different - in Orweel's book it was to entertain and distract the proles, whereas here it's an attempt to defraud people for money. I don't know which one is worse.
Is there any part of this seminal book that *hasn't* happened yet? Two-way telescreens in our homes I suppose - but I'd wager that's coming, and most likely will be here within the next 5-10 years...
What about some sort of signed publisher (uploader) tag, that is the only thing Amazon tracks? Then you can build in the ability to block certain publishers.
It also filters the real books out - I know the real publisher, so I can limit searches to authentic ebooks.
I've noticed the spambooks since I got a Kindle 3 months ago - it makes buying on the Kindle itself a bit inconvenient if browsing, but I just buy from a web browser on a my desktop which allows me to sift through the spam a bit easier.
You can also help by reporting the spambooks to Amazon.
If an e-book had to have a certain number of pages viewable, or a certain percentage, then it would allow potential readers to see if the book is crap. Not a full guarantee, but a start.
Or, allowing for a reader to reclaim their purchase price with a reasonable short span of time
for reasons of it being "crap" could work, provided that a certain threshold was reached.
For example, lets say 1 person in 100 says its crap, then a refund would not be allowed.
If, however, 80 in 100 did, then it would. Tweak this as you see fit.
I'm an indie author of ebooks, doing this mostly for fun rather than having a particular financial goal in mind. My ebooks have all be free to download from my website and other 'free' ebook distribution sites.
Earlier this year I discovered my own work being 'sold' on Amazon by an individual I'd never heard of. My books were lifted verbatim, and sold (rather ineptly) without even changing the cover pages - which had my name on.
Took me three months to sort it out, with no guarantee it won't happen again. Amazon were very lethargic. Wrote the whole thing up on my blog - google should find it.
I'm just about to publish a non-free book on Amazon, so I agree there has to be a way to get rid of the dross, copies, auto-books etc. Amazon needs to step up to the mark.
Cheers,
Drew Wagar
I'm an Amazon Kindle author and I'd happily pay a fee of £10 to publish. I'd have liked to have got an ISBN, but they're only available in batches of 10 for > £100.
Plug - look for The Boy by Peter Kendell on Kindle :)
Paris - because I'm sure she'd be my biggest fan, if only...
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