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.

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.

Inside the traded content, the information is very basic and often the text is poorly written, little better than what might be found on a content-farm page, though it tends to go on for 50 or so pages. Some of the spam e-books, such as Zero to Fifty in 30 Days, encourage their readers to set up a website and offer for sale a "valuable free report" they find online.

Reuters cites Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University as saying that 2.8 million nontraditional books were published in 2010 alongside 302,000 conventional paper books. For comparison, 2002 saw fewer than 250,000 books published over both categories.

While some of the millions last year are worthwhile books routing around the morass that can be traditional publishing, many are recycled, even stolen content. Mike Essex, a search specialist at digital marketing firm Koozai, copied and pasted the lyrics to "This Is The Song That Never Ends" over 700 pages, ended the song prematurely, and posted it to Amazon's Kindle store, which apparently does not even do a cursory check for repetition that is done to boost page counts and make books look like they are a better value.





Reuters also spoke to an author, Shayne Parkinson, who found one of her novels posted for sale by someone else under a different name. Other spam sellers simply co-opt the name of a well-known author to attach to their books, and if he's no longer alive to defend himself, even better: the prolific e-book author Manuel Ortiz Braschi sells a version of Pursuit by Lester Del Rey, who died in 1993, which Ortiz claims to have edited.

The content is also becoming increasingly self-referential, not unlike the Zero to Fifty book described above. There are now several titles readers can purchase that will teach them to turn found content around into 10 to 20 Kindle e-books they can sell for an income stream of their very own.

We expect Amazon would have a difficult time trying to prevent the spam books from entering their market at all, but some better filtering tools might help. Amazon stated to Ars that it has "processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store," as such books "don't improve the customer experience." Given The Song That Never Ends Vol. 1 and Ortiz's edition of Pursuit, these tools could perhaps be more robust.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, suggested that Amazon could establish a social networking solution that lets users see recommendations from trusted friends. This is similar to Google's +1 service attached to search results, aimed at dealing with Google's own problems with spam rising in its own search ranks.

Another proposed solution is requiring a fee from would-be authors to post their books on the Kindle store. While small costs clearly don't deter many authors who are already paying a few dollars for PLR content, a slightly larger cost of $50 to $100 might be enough to slow down opportunists like Ortiz, who has posted over 3,800 books for sale in the Kindle store.