Amazon finally cracking down on spam books

Remember back in June we reported on the topic of spam books taking over Amazon’s Kindle book store? Well, just in case you forgot, spammers have re-publishing books (both out of copyright and those still under copyright) as their own titles; indirectly stealing money from many self-published authors who have worked hard to write them in the first place.

After months of these scams going on, it seems like Amazon is finally cracking down on those spammers. According to an email that a spammer received recently, here’s what Amazon had to say:

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

Finally, Amazon is doing something about the situation but it looks like they’ll be manually combing through the books so it’s going to take some time before all the spam books currently available are taken off the virtual shelves – and in the meantime even more spam books will probably be on the rise. I guess it’s better than them not doing anything at all, right?

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