Amazon makes it extremely easy to take a bunch of words and publish them as a book for the Kindle e-reader. And longtime professional writers like Edward Jay Epstein, the author of books on Hollywood, diamonds and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, are refashioning their collected works into electronic format.

“The numbers are not great — last weekend I sold only 165 e-books — but they grow, like compound interest, with each new title,” he wrote recently at theatlanticwire.com.

But if anyone can publish, everyone will publish. The Kindle Store on Amazon has been inundated with spurious or duplicative ebooks issued under a retail concept known as “private label rights,” or P.L.R. At the supermarket, it works this way: Jars of jelly or cans of green beans might be branded with the name of the store, but they were actually produced by another company that is invisible to the consumer.

When P.L.R. is applied to e-books, someone writes something — say, a guide to marketing information on Kindle — and then sells the rights to others, who repackage it under their own name and title. In theory, the new owner is also supposed to refashion the text to make it his own, but this does not often happen. A search on “Kindle marketing” in the Kindle store turned up 12,990 results.

Amazon, apparently worried that consumers will get lost in a maze of indistinguishable items, appears to be cracking down. On Warrior Forum, an Internet marketing site, commentators have been reporting this week that Amazon was yanking their P.L.R. e-books from the Kindle store. Amazon tells the offenders that their copycats “diminish the experience for customers.”

Asked about this, an Amazon spokeswoman, Brittany Turner, said, “We have worked steadily to build processes to detect and remove undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of e-books.”

A creator of these “books” who posts on Warrior Forum under the name Brobdingnagian wrote, “I had 22 books up, which only took a long weekend to ‘write’ (more like format) and publish … It was one of my first tastes of online success — albeit small — and to have it yanked away is a kick in the pants.”

But, he acknowledged, one he entirely deserved. He wrote that while he was “formatting these books and slapping em upon Amazon, a nagging little voice” told him he was trying to pull a fast one and would get caught. “Shoulda listened,” he wrote.