Tuesday, February 7, 2012

[Link] Amazon's Plagiarism Problem / The Kindle Swindle

Amazon's Plagiarism Problem
by Adam Penenberg

Amazon's erotica section isn't just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It's also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn't appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action.

Continue reading: http://www.fastcompany.com/1807211/amazons-plagiarism-problem

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The Kindle Swindle
by Laura Hazard Owen
March 2011 (but still applicable concerning this topic)

Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Koozai, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Koozai blog.

In his blog post, Essex pointed out that readers won’t necessarily recognize whether content has been plagiarized. And if an e-book is exposed as plagiarized, the author can simply take it down and resubmit it under a new name. A bad review on one site won’t keep people from buying the same ebook on another site. And these titles are priced so low that unhappy buyers may not bother complain.

Essex carried out an experiment for PT: “I took the lyrics to the song ‘This is the song that never ends’ and repeated them over 700-plus pages. No formatting, just one continuous block of duplicate text. Within 24 hours, it was live on the Amazon Kindle Store and I haven’t received a single message from Amazon about it. Surely an automated process would be able to easily tell I had repeated myself over and over, but this wasn’t flagged up.

Continue reading: http://www.publishingtrends.com/2011/03/the-kindle-swindle/

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