On Impact Media’s Digital Marketing Blog about a month ago, Mike Essex posited that Google’s moves to reduce the effectiveness of content farms might make e-books the next attractive frontier for search-engine spammers.
Essex suggests that a number of factors including the inefficiency of most e-book platforms’ copyright checks, the ease of slapping books together, the high royalty payouts, and the strong web ranks of most e-book platforms make e-books look very good to the sort of people who used to make a business out of scamming search engine hits.
He argues that e-book platforms really need to take a more proactive stance in dealing with this sort of exploitation of their systems, with measures such as integrating plagiarism detectors, verifying rights to blog-sourced content, making it easy to report stolen content, and spot-checking books from authors with suspiciously high numbers. He notes that if e-book stores are overrun with this sort of content, it makes legitimate e-books look bad as well.
We’ve certainly already seen some of this kind of thing pop up—a few months ago, I mentioned John Scalzi’s annoyance over fake, republished-Wikipedia-article books crowding out his own books in Barnes & Noble’s search rankings. Those were paper rather than e-books, but the principle is similar—and indeed, fake republished e-books would be even easier to do. Hopefully Amazon and other e-publishers will get together and deal with the problem before it begins.
Found via the Library Journal blog.)
Expecting publishers to get together to solve a problem that doesn’t yet exist?
You do know who we’re talking about, right? Irony abounds.
Ah, well, it’s not as if other companies are particularly pro-active, either. I’m sure we can depend on this warning going completely ignored, until the industry begins to suffer catastrophic losses… then we’ll wait out a few studies about the problem, a few ignored calls for action from consumers, a few more John Scalzis publicly complaining about lost sales, and at least one good scandal (along the lines of the scammers working for a competing publisher, etc) before anything is done. I’ve got the bread; bring on the circus.
Over at Publishing Trends I followed up with Mike Essex and we conducted some research into the spam that’s filling up the Kindle Store…story here: http://www.publishingtrends.com/2011/03/the-kindle-swindle/