Amazon Facing Growing Problem With Plagiarism
Amazon offers a good service for self-published authors who want to make money selling their work in electronic format. However, a growing plagiarism issue is now coming to light.
Amazon’s Kindle Store platform has become a full featured, virtual bookstore, where people can buy practically any type of book, such as romance books online or the latest best sellers, all in electronic format. While, as expected, many of the books being sold through Amazon’s platforms are the works of famous authors who have also published many other books in paper format, there are also self-published authors who use the service in order to sell some of their eBooks. However, this has given rise to a problem that is relatively rare in the printed book sector: plagiarism.
A recent report by the Digital Journal sheds some light on the problem. One of the sections where this problem has appeared the most is in the erotic eBooks collection. Written erotic material remains a multi million dollar industry and many online marketing experts believe that Amazon has made the right business decision to create an erotic books section where adults who are looking for this kind of material are able to purchase it at prices much lower than what a paper book would cost.
However, a quick investigation by reporters and Sharazade, the pen name of an author who wrote several erotic books, reveals that the erotic section of Amazon’s online collection of books is full of plagiarized content. Spotting a plagiarized book is often simple enough. The cover contains pixelated art of low quality, often copied directly from Google Image Search. Titles are often unimaginative and sometimes misspelled. There have even been eBooks sold where the name of the author contained an obvious spelling mistake. However, once the content of the adult romance novels is examined, the reader would seem blown away by the quality.
The problem is, that the text of the book is often just plagiarized straight from free websites, such as Lite Erotica, where amateur authors can submit their works and have them read by others, for free. There have also been cases where entire eBooks found on other sites, either public domain books that were distributed for free and even some commercial books were copied and pasted, then sold under a new title on Amazon.
Many authors, especially self published ones who write erotic eBooks, are naturally quite upset about this. If readers are to get the impression that self published books are nothing more than copies of material that can be found freely floating around on the internet, they may lose interest and be very reluctant to make any purchase on Amazon again. However, the press report gives an easy solution: every submitted book should be automatically checked for plagiarism. There are many automated solutions available online which can do this and a company like Amazon can certainly implement them.
In any case, readers of erotic materials or more mainstream books should still remember that the majority of content sold by self published authors is their own work and the quality often rivals those of experienced authors who have been publishing paper based books for decades.