Moco News reports: Today Bits reports that commenters on Warrior Forum—the site where those autopilot Kindle cash DVDs are sold—have found Amazon yanking their PLR content. An Amazon spokeswoman told the NYT, “We have worked steadily to build processes to detect and remove undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of e-books.” Here’s the e-mail from Amazon that one Kindle spammer pasted into Warrior Forum: Hello, We’re contacting you regarding books you recently submitted via Kindle Direct Publishing. Certain of these books are either undifferentiated or barely differentiated from an existing title in the Kindle store. We remove such duplicate (or...

If you think spam on the Kindle or Nook store is annoying, how would you feel if authors started producing "ebooks" that were loaded with affiliate marketing links and direct sales pitches? Oh right, that's called the Web. But Cathedral Rock Publishing wants to bring that wearying concept into the world of digital publishing in a big way. Although the company is promoting its new "Ebook is the Store" concept in terms of musicians selling their songs from within an ebook, in reality the idea is that you can sell anything, or better still everything. Here are two cringe-inducing bits...

From Reuters: Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. 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. These ebooks are listed for sale -- often at 99 cents -- alongside more traditional books on Amazon's website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want. Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach...

On Impact Media’s Digital Marketing Blog about a month ago, Mike Essex posited that Google’s moves to reduce the effectiveness of content farms might make e-books the next attractive frontier for search-engine spammers. Essex suggests that a number of factors including the inefficiency of most e-book platforms’ copyright checks, the ease of slapping books together, the high royalty payouts, and the strong web ranks of most e-book platforms make e-books look very good to the sort of people who used to make a business out of scamming search engine hits. He argues that e-book platforms really need to...

The following comment was made to our story about the NY Times iPad app. I think it's pretty shoddy behavior on the part of the Times. Here's what's going on: ... by signing up for a NY Times account thru the iPad app, the confirmation email link that you have to use to enable the account signs you up for a NY Times ” product and services” spam mailing list. You have no choice in the matter if you want to use the app. And you can’t opt out EXCEPT by logging into your new account from a web...

Just a reminder that we’ve got a spamtrap in effect because we receive literally hundreds of spam comments per day. They range from the generic (umpteen zillion ways to say, “Your blog is awesome! I totally agree with everything you have to say. You are such a good writer to know how to make your points so clearly!”) to the strange (the person who claimed to be held prisoner by the Irish mafia who were making him post spam for a Christmas website) to just plain garbage. Sometimes our spamtrap has been known to get a little overzealous...

Since last night, we have been deluged by around a thousand spam comments from a particularly persistent free-iPhone-site spammer. At 20 comments per page, that’s a lot of spam to go through for false positives! In that light, it is entirely possible that some comments, including lengthier ones, may accidentally be passed over and lost during our trawl to clear the spam out of our trap. If you post a comment that does not show up on the site for several hours—especially if it was a longer one, mentioned sales or had several URLs in it, or comes from the...