Spammers Ruin Everything, chapter 3,876,924: e-books

Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book store lets you sell your own self-published books. That’s very nice for authors who can’t land a book deal or just want to keep a bigger cut of the proceeds from the sales. Democratized system, right? Everybody wins? But here comes the spammers. Reuters reports on a growing amount of book spam. These are 99-cent titles that might look like the kinds of books you’re looking for but they’re completely auto-generated. You can even buy software that pulls information (sometimes huge excerpts of legit books) off the internet and creates a “book” that can then lure people in to spending a dollar. So if you’re looking for books on gluten-free cooking and most are ten bucks and one costs a dollar, you might buy it only to find out it’s full of gobbledygook.