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 near duplicate) versions of the same book because they diminish the experience for customers. We notify you each time a book is removed, along with the specific book(s) and reason for removal.

In addition to removing duplicate books from the Kindle store, please note that if you attempt to sell multiple copies or undifferentiated versions of the same book from your account, we may terminate your account.

If you have any questions regarding the review process, you can write to kdp-quality@amazon.com.

Best regards,

Kindle Direct Publishing
http://kdp.amazon.com

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 their recent press release and website.

Press release:

As the name suggests, Cathedral Rock puts e-commerce directly into the eBook by transforming MultiMedia eBooks into discreet stores that offer products and services to a target audience that is essentially pre-sold because they’ve already bought the book. The old adage is true: The easiest customer to sell to is an existing one. In addition, customers are most predisposed to upsells when they make the initial purchase.

And not just digital delivery…

Perhaps even more compelling, authors and publishers aren’t limited to selling digital products. They can sell services—as well as other people’s products and services—that are compatible with their readers’ interests. In other words, the “Book IS the Store” application lends itself naturally to joint ventures and affiliates, which Cathedral Rock expects will become commonplace due to “time to market” constraints, and “building vs. partnering” realities.

Website:

Now the good news for authors, book publishers and just about anyone who wants to make money from MultiMedia eBooks is…

You don’t have to create all of your own content to make money. What this means is that you don’t have to create all the additional products that the customer would find attractive after or “during” their read of your MultiMedia eBook.

On a related note, the EPUB format can support audio and video on its own.

Via eBookNewser

(Photo: garry knight)

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 people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word.

This new phenomenon represents the dark side of an online revolution that’s turning the traditional publishing industry on its head by giving authors new ways to access readers directly.

Much more in the article, including some words by Mark Coker of Smashwords.

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 take a more proactive stance in dealing with this sort of exploitation of their systems, with measures such as integrating plagiarism detectors, verifying rights to blog-sourced content, making it easy to report stolen content, and spot-checking books from authors with suspiciously high numbers. He notes that if e-book stores are overrun with this sort of content, it makes legitimate e-books look bad as well.

We’ve certainly already seen some of this kind of thing pop up—a few months ago, I mentioned John Scalzi’s annoyance over fake, republished-Wikipedia-article books crowding out his own books in Barnes & Noble’s search rankings. Those were paper rather than e-books, but the principle is similar—and indeed, fake republished e-books would be even easier to do. Hopefully Amazon and other e-publishers will get together and deal with the problem before it begins.

Found via the Library Journal blog.)

… 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 browser. You can’t get to account info from inside the app. That’s a serious drawback.

I was going to download the app and give it a spin, but not now.

Sometimes our spamtrap has been known to get a little overzealous and swallow legitimate comments (due to some arcane combination of keywords or alignment of stars or something), but we check the spamtrap several times per day. As long as we don’t get deluged again we should be all right to find false positives sooner or later. (Unfortunately, they will usually get posted in the order in which they were received, which means if we’ve received a lot of comments since then they might not show up in the “Newest comments” bar—I’ve asked about it but there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about that.)

If you post a message and it seems to disappear, please don’t try to post it again—if the first posting of it vanished, odds are the second one will as well, and we’ll just end up with multiple copies of that post in the spamtrap. If you’re really concerned, contact us by e-mail or twitter and we’ll look as soon as we can (though it may not be much sooner than we would have been able to otherwise—I work 8 hours a day, for instance).

Thanks for your patience.

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 one or two TeleRead commenters who know that our spamtrap just doesn’t like them for some reason)—it may have been accidentally deleted in which case you will need to re-post it.

I would encourage you to copy and save the text of longer comments into a notepad file against the possibility of that happening, at least until we can deal with the deluge. We care a great deal about our comments, and do our best to rescue every mistakenly-trapped from one the spamtrap, but when this much junk hits our filters at once it becomes much more likely we’ll miss some.

(And as a reminder, first posts from new commenters are directed to a separate moderation queue, which we also check several times a day. If you’ve never made a comment before, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t show up until we can approve it, but it most assuredly hasn’t been lost or buried in spam.)

Thank you for your patience.

Update: Paul has located a WordPress plugin that can block by IP address. It seems to be working so far!