Why Amazon’s Plagiarism Problem Is More Than A Public Relations Issue

Plagiarized editions for sale in Amazon’s Kindle store show how the company is still adapting to the world of original content creation.

At the same time, the stolen books may also present a test of the retailer’s ability to rely on a widely used legal shield that protects content sites from being accused of copyright infringement. Spammy and stolen e-books—either plagiarized copies of copyrighted works by other authors, or books thrown together from “private label rights” (PLR) content, which can be bought very cheaply online and quickly formatted into multiple e-books—have long been a problem in the Kindle store. “We’ve found that the folks spreading PLR are also more likely to be plagiarists of real book content” as well, says Mark Coker, the CEO of e-book publishing platform Smashwords (a competitor of Amazon’s self-publishing platform). In many instances, Coker says, plagiarized and PLR content banned by Smashwords still appears in the Kindle and Nook stores. He says those stores don’t vet content as thoroughly as Smashwords does.