E-Reader Owners Watch Your Wallets: Plagiarism Abounds

by Jamie Freveletti



If you haven't read the recent Fast Company article about rampant plagiarism on Amazon, check it out. Turns out that some entrepreneurial souls are uploading plagiarised material and swiping the cash from under the noses of the legitimate authors. While the article focuses on erotica books, I presume it is occuring elsewhere as well. I was surprised by the number of plagiarised works one "author" uploaded--51, with more going up every few days.

It takes me about nine months to write a book and two months to rewrite. At my rate it will take me over thirty years to match her (or his) output. Honestly, I couldn't type, format, create a cover and upload a book that fast. They must be buying them, scanning them, and then uploading it again with a new title and author name. In this case, copy and paste is a beautiful tool.

While this fraud hurts the writer, clearly, it also hurts the readers as well. 

A friend recounted to me that one of her relatives, an avid reader, downloaded a kindle book, read it and then downloaded another. Guess what, the second book was exactly the first, but with a new title and author. Naturally, she was upset. While the outlay wasn't great-the book was either .99 or 2.99, she was still hoodwinked. She wasn't sure who had repackaged the book--the author trying to make a second sale out of the same manuscript or a con man looking to make some fast cash. I'd like to think it was a con man but there is really no way to tell.

And there's little that can be done unless the platform software--in the story it's Amazon, makes an effort to run the book through a program to catch copying.

So just another way for thieves to part you from your cash.

As if we didn't already have enough to worry about!