Spam clogging Amazon's Kindle self-publishing

Disguised as e-books, the problem is irritant to buyers and real authors

Brian Snyder / Reuters

A commuter reads on his Kindle e-reader as a subway train arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 18, 2011.

By Alistair Barr

Reuters

updated 6/17/2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com's publishing foray.

Thousands of digital books, called e-books, 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 e-books 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.
Full piece here.