Amazon Kindle overrun with spam books

If you’re an author who self-published a book on Amazon’s Kindle book store, and you’re wondering why nobody seems to be buying your books – it’s not because your book is unpopular. Chances are, it’s been buried in spam. According to reports online, it looks like the Kindle book store is suffering from the same issues as the Android Market: an overload of spam books. Because Amazon doesn’t govern the Kindle store and lets authors easily self-publish their own books, just like Google’s Android Market, there has store has been filled with poor excuses for books.

Spammers have been re-publishing out of copyright books as their own books (sometimes books still under copyright as well), putting a price on them, with a new title or cover and making money just like that. And most of these spam books are poor copies of the original material, with badly formatted text, missing sections, and basically not worth the money spent to purchase them. The worst part about this is that the spam books are topping the charts.

While spam on other outlets (i.e. blogs and email) have been easily stopped, how does one stop spam books from being sold? Surely Amazon can’t afford to hire people just to check the thousands of books submitted every day. Some people suggest that Amazon start charging authors to publish books on their store, but that defeats the whole purpose of its free, self-publishing store in the first place. Any authors out there who have experienced this problem with the Kindle book store?

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: Amazon, Kindle, spam, store