Amazon Cracks Down on Some E-Book ‘Publishers’

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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 are refashioning their collected works into electronic format. 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” (PLR). 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 PLR 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 PLR e-books from the Kindle store. Amazon tells the offenders that their copycats “diminish the experience for customers.”


Amazon Cracks Down on Some E-Book ‘Publishers’