Kindle e-book store slammed by spam "authors"

[n2doc]

y Casey Johnston | Published about an hour ago

Amazon's Kindle e-books store has been hit hard by spam in the last few months, according to Reuters. Hundreds of entities are pulling quasi-useless content found for free or for a small price on the Internet, reformatting it into e-books, and selling it under catchy titles for very little, clogging Amazon with low-value materials that stand to mire the platform and maybe make customers think twice about future e-book purchases.

Many of the books are created with Private Label Rights (PLR) content, which is often milled by content creators on the Internet and then made available for free or a low price. PLR content can then be reformatted or even modified if the buyer wants, and then put up for sale under virtually anyone's name. PLR content is usually of the beginner-how-to or get-rich-quick variety that baits those looking for their elevator to success: make a certain number of dollars in a much smaller number of days, money-making blogging for beginners, how to start an Internet marketing business.


A private label rights (PLR) book sells for $7 on a website.
Content like this is posted around the Internet for free or at low prices—one purveyor we found, Jett Digitals, sells the PLR to a light tome called Podcasting for Beginners for $7—and once bought, the buyer is free to do whatever he or she wants with it. In this case, they can simply convert it to a Kindle e-book, submit it to the store, and begin reaping 30 to 70 percent profit from each sale.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/06/kindle-e-book-store-slammed-by-spam-authors.ars

And then there's this kind of book spam: