Amazon at Risk: its Kindle Platform can be Spammed!

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Amazon is at risk: because it's so easy and cheap to publish on Kindle, anyone does it, including spammers. They get public domain content (free) and repackage it with a new title and cover, and voilĂ ! Readers are taken in and buy something they could have had free. And the Kindle is awash with spurious, useless content.

Not good for Amazon's reputation in its primary market: readers.

But the damage doesn't stop there. Writers also are hurt by some smart alecks who re-publish the more popular ebook titles under a new title, author name and cover, just changing slightly the text so as to avoid any out-and-out plagiarism (and that's when they're careful...)

But it's piracy nonetheless...and it's beginning to give a bad name to Amazon's Kindle - including among writers. What was a golden opportunity for writers to go down the road of self-publishing isn't looking so good anymore.

This story was first picked up by Reuters and then expanded/explained by Eric Mack on PCWorld. And picked up by many around the blogosphere and in the media (I've listed a few of the more interesting articles below).

Eric Mack suggests Amazon could charge "authors $50, $20, or even just $10 to publish to Amazon".  He feels "any author that spent months or years crafting a quality work should have no problem shelling out a small amount to access a global market and ensure that there's fewer titles to weed through".

Would you agree with that? Would you pay something - say up to $50 - so Amazon can check and weed out the spammers? I know I would!

It need not be such a difficult task for Amazon to start acting as a gatekeeper. I may be wrong, but surely  Amazon could set up some sort of computerized system that would go through submissions and using keywords, alert them to subject matter/content that is most likely to be spammed (like things related to public domain). Also, it should be possible for a computer to scan a text to see if it is identical (or very close) to another already published and popular e-book. All that would take time (and money) of course, and slow down the 48 hour turn-around that now exists when you submit an e-book for the Kindle platform. But surely it would be worth waiting for...

What do you think? Are you as a writer ready to pay Amazon something so that they start doing a better job as a "gatekeeper"?

I know readers would welcome a stronger "gatekeeping" role for Amazon!  

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