I sent it to them nearly three and half months ago, so I’m fairly certain they’re not going to respond at this point. To me, it’s a perfect example of how a local bookstore can fail at building a relationship with local customers who want to shop locally but prefer ebooks over print.

Here’s what I wrote:

I briefly stepped into McNally Jackson this past Saturday, and although it was too crowded for my tastes, before I left I glanced over a couple of tables at the front of the store. I found a trade paperback of science essays titled Future Science that I wanted.

But here’s where the problem comes in, and why I’m writing to you: I wanted it in ebook format, because if I bought books in print these days I’d essentially turn into a third Collier brother. But I couldn’t figure out a way to buy it in ebook format while in your store.

I looked up at the register to see if I could ask about this option there, but there was a line of about five customers waiting to buy printed books. That’s great news for you, but not so much for me since I already wanted badly to get out of there.

I thought about asking the woman at the Espresso Book Machine, but she seemed busy, and not at a register.

I looked around for some sort of signage or instruction about how to buy a Google Books digital edition from within the store, and I couldn’t find it (maybe I overlooked it?)

So here’s what I did. I left the store, and literally before I crossed Mulberry Street I’d used my phone to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.

Now to be clear, I didn’t buy the Kindle version because of price, or because I hate bookstores, or because I’m naive about the financially precarious state of indie booksellers. I’m pro-McNally Jackson, just not to the point where I’d buy a format I don’t actually want or need just to help a business I don’t own.

I wanted to share some thoughts about this with you:

• I wanted to buy the book right then, while it was fresh on my mind, not later (for instance not from your website when I finally got home hours later).
• I’m not a Kindle fanatic. I know how to strip DRM and I can easily adapt most of my ebook purchases to suit my needs.
• I’m price conscious but, unless there was a price difference of 50% or more on the Google Books edition over the Kindle edition, I would have bought the Google Books edition as a show of support for your store. (It turns out, the price for both digital editions was the same.)
• It was the physical, face-to-face encounter with the trade paperback that prompted me to make the purchase, so I feel that you should have received that sale.

So I’m at a loss as to how I can help support you. I’m a frequent book buyer, and I want to support McNally Jackson, but there’s no real place for me as a customer in your store right now so far as I can tell.

I realize I’m probably still in the tiny minority of your current customers, and this isn’t meant to be a rant. But if you can figure out a way to let people like me browser [sic] the merchandise and then leave your physical store with a digital edition instead of print, you’d be my first and pretty much only bookstore in Manhattan from now on.

Here’s what I got in response:

And that’s why I don’t feel bad for buying my ebooks from online retailers that aren’t connected to this bookstore.

But then—even though Amazon’s promotion was aimed more at big box retailers—the crazy publishing industry types had to get involved.

If you want to see the collective mind of U.S. bookselling culture at its lockstep worse, first read Farhad Manjoo’s provocative article at Slate where he praises Amazon’s Kindle initiative and disparages local indie bookstores. Then take a deep breath and read the comments. No, wait, the comments are filled with stuff that’s too easy to dismiss as weird nonsensical ranting, like the commenter who claims authors don’t get royalties from Amazon sales. Go instead to the The New York Observer and follow some of the links in that summary.

For example, The Observer describes New York bookseller Dustin Kurtz’s response to the Slate article as a “play-by-play excoriation,” and it’s being praised and passed around the Internet by what I can only assume are people with rabies. Although it looks at first like a methodical takedown of Manjoo’s arguments—the kind of written fistfight I love to dive into—it’s actually just a string of increasingly emotional and sarcastic insults. A true counterargument would rationally dissect each of Manjoo’s statements and show how he’s wrong to dismiss the local bookstore model; Kurtz just goes for emotional outbursts, as if the average customer will be swayed by the party that displays the most contempt.

It’s fine to have an emotional tirade in private, where you invent new obscenities to heap upon Amazon and lay a series of elaborate curses upon Bezos’ family tree. But the rest of us don’t care about that. The only thing that I, by which I mean a Random Customer, want to know is why I should support a local bookseller even if it can never compete on price or selection. I want the bookseller advocate to show me facts that I’m too inexperienced or blinkered to see on my own.

Instead, we get stuff like this. Manjoo writes that bookstores used to have the advantage of letting customers sample books before buying them, but that this “advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.” Kurtz’s response:

This guy. Okay first, publishers do that as well, and Google. We would, too if competing with Amazon didn’t mean we couldn’t afford a better website. But more importantly, IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.

So if I’m reading Manjoo correctly, he’s saying that bookstores have lost a competitive edge—book sampling—now that the ebook infrastructure has matured. Manjoo explicitly points out that this isn’t just an Amazon feature. Kurtz responds that publishers and Google also offer this, which in fact supports Manjoo’s original statement. He then sidesteps the issue to complain that Amazon’s existence has prevented him from creating a good website. I can’t disprove that statement, although based on my experience building websites over the past decade it sounds foolish. I can, however, show Kurtz this sample page from a local indie bookseller [update: I think it's his own store, in fact] that uses a Google affiliate account to provide free digital previews. Yes, I just helped Kurtz counter one of Manajoo’s statements with actual evidence. You’re welcome, furious bookseller.

I don’t even understand the final part of Kurtz’s response in the quote above. I mean, I think Manjoo is saying that previewing a book is a good thing, and that any bookseller would want to offer it to customers. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to include it in a comparison of what retailers offer to consumers. And…Kurtz doesn’t? What? At any rate, I don’t need a chamber pot, although I do think the term “night soil” is pretty awesome.

The whole piece is like that. Kurtz argues that bookstore employees are better at making recommendations to customers than a recommendation algorithm, and that a bookstore can order a book and have it ready for you to pick up in the same time it would take you to receive it from Amazon. The first statement doesn’t accurately describe the real world shopping experience, and the second one misses the point about what makes for a competitive advantage.

When it comes to recommendations, what booksellers aren’t willing to acknowledge is that Manjoo isn’t talking solely about Amazon when he notes the competitive advantages bookstores have lost in recent years. Manjoo’s point is that when you buy a book online, you have access to a vast amount of data that a physical bookstore can’t provide on its own. If I pick up a new paperback by a well-known thriller author in a bookstore, I have, at best, less than a handful of data points to help me decide whether to buy it: the back-of-book summary and any promotional blurbs, a quick skimming of the opening pages, a personal thumbs up or down from the employee, and in rare cases the feedback of another customer. If I look at the same book online—and not only when I’m shopping on Amazon, but at any time when I’m near a computer and remember the book—I can visit Goodreads, look at Amazon and B&N customer reviews, grab an offline sample to read later when I’m ready, search for author interviews and professional reviews. And it’s not just that I have more points of data, but that more of them are impartial. On top of all that, the Internet lets me comparison shop for my preferred price/format combo.

As for Kurtz’s claim that a bookseller can order a book for you in the same time you’d get it from Amazon, assuming that’s a true statement (I don’t know of any evidence one way or the other), it doesn’t address other competitive disadvantages for a local retailer like pricing or the limited recommendation tools I just described. In fact, it actually highlights those disadvantages, which works in the online retailer’s favor.

Kurtz is just one bookseller. He was having a fit, and I sympathize with that. But wait, here’s writer and editor Judy Berman at Flavorwire: she not only mocks Manjoo for rationally preferring to shop at the retailer with the best prices and recommendation tools, but she also dismisses book consumers who share their thoughts online as stereotypical basement nerds:

I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers. It also seems specious to argue that Amazon customer reviews are more useful than the advice of an independent bookstore employee or owner, who presumably has more knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature than your average unknown dude typing angrily in his parents’ basement.

Then there are the absurd exchanges like this one on Twitter (you can see a screen capture here), where a Penguin executive insists that self-publishing and the current “singles” trend in e-publishing existed well before Amazon, but refuses to acknowledge the massive transformation the Amazon Kindle has forced upon the marketplace despite the continuing resistance of traditional publishers like Penguin—a transformation that has so far benefitted every sector of the industry but one: physical bookstores.

The real issue here is that there’s a false technological divide, one booksellers (and their traditionalist fans as well as many publishers) have created to their own collective detriment. They demand to know of you, the consumer: Do you support humans or robot overlords? Do you support small business or faceless corporations? (But please ignore those corporate behemoths who provide our merchandise—we need you to hate only this specific evil corporation.) Berman even pulls out the old political us vs. them values deceit, writing that “We would also prefer to see our cash go to small business owners (and their employees) whose values are more in line with our own.” Quick, someone bring the two major political parties into this dust up, because I think we just went there.

STOP, LOCAL BOOKSELLER ENTHUSIASTS. JUST STOP. Reading your outbursts reminds me of when a family member of mine was diagnosed with diabetes, yet refused to acknowledge it or change her diet. Look, there actually are things local bookstores can claim as authentic competitive advantages against online retailers like Amazon:

• You can lease an Espresso Machine and offer true instant gratification to your customers. At the same time, start pushing publishers to make more new releases available on the Espresso platform, and push Xerox and On Demand Books to continue improving the quality of the final Espresso product. Consider ways to use the machine to provide local self-publishing services and classes. Unless you’re a publishing elitist, the idea of helping regular people read and write and exchange one-off, custom books and journals should be bookseller nirvana to you.
   
• You can keep developing the concept of the local bookstore as the only place to meet authors. Figure out unique, site-specific variations on the old-fashioned book signing, like how Housing Works Used Book Café in NYC had a live band join Jennifer Egan at a reading earlier this year. Find ways to increase the personalization of the traditional book reading. Perhaps you could collect questions from local customers ahead of an author’s visit, and offer those whose questions are answered at the event some special perk, like maybe a smaller “private” Q&A with the author before or after the event.
   
• You can send the marketing of local authors into overdrive, and market your store as an integral component of the very fabric of your local culture. You want customers who shop with you to feel a visceral sense of pride and connection to local history when they step through your doors—it’s a value proposition no online retailer can offer.
   
• You can find better ways to sell ebooks. Figure out how to intercept price-conscious customers before they leave the store, not so you can guilt-trip them into buying from you but so you can make them special offers, or you can teach them how to buy ebooks from your website so that you still make a little revenue.
   
• Finally you can learn to respond to market threats positively, at least around ebook customers, so that they instinctively want to be on your side. When I wrote a thoughtful, knowledgable email to the owner of a local bookstore in NYC earlier this year explaining how their current ebook strategy was losing them customers (you can read it here), I received no reply. Zilch. Crickets. By comparison, do you know how many indie software developers have personally responded to my random bits of feedback over the past five years? All of them. Seriously. Even the Symbian game developer in Russia, whose English was not so good (although a lot better than my Russian). Indie developers know that every customer matters, and that the next useful insight could come from anywhere. If they resented my input, they didn’t show it to me.

Why more local booksellers aren’t aggressively pursuing these strategies, or ones similar to or better than them, instead of throwing fits online about an article that’s at least 65% accurate about the shrinking value prop of the local bookstore, is beyond me. I guess ultimately I just like books more than they do.

(Photo: go ask alice…)

Phased access starting in late October

In a blog post on Pottermore Insider, they refined their original “opening in October” announcement as follows:

Since the launch of the Beta, we’ve seen really high levels of activity, and interaction with the site has been phenomenal. This affects how quickly we can give everyone access. As a result, we’ve decided to extend the Beta period beyond September and take a different approach to the way new users are brought onto the site.

From the end of October, registration will be opened to everyone and we’ll be giving access to registered users in phases. Access may be granted quickly, but please note it could also take some weeks or months, depending on demand.

I believe their claim about high levels of activity. I scored one of the early accounts back in the first week of August, but didn’t get access until just a few weeks ago. The first time I tried to log on, I was rejected due to server traffic. The second time I tried a day later, I got on but the site took forever to load screens. As noted in today’s status update, at least one highly popular part of the site—the Wizard’s Duel—has been disabled because it’s too popular and/or buggy.

No ebooks until 2012

The other big delay is in the ebook and audiobook store that’s supposed to accompany the site. Now instead of opening in October with the site, the online store won’t open until sometime in the first half of 2012—which means it could be as late as next summer before you can buy Harry Potter in ebook format.

What you’re missing

I recorded my first few moments on the site to share with everyone, so here’s a video and some screen captures. There are more detailed previews and tours all over YouTube now, but I attempted to highlight some of the ways the original new writing is being integrated into the site. (The swoosh-zoom effects are mine, in order to show you close-up details.)

In general, although I thought the design was great, I was left underwhelmed by the overall experience. But I’m probably not the ideal target audience by either age or enthusiasm, and the site was running a little slow the day I poked around.

Maybe this new phased launch strategy will give Sony time to make the experience faster and smoother for true HP fans. Unfortunately, some of those fans now may have to wait until 2012 to get a first-hand glimpse of Pottermore.

RELATED POSTS
“A beta tester’s early review of Pottermore”
“Rowling will sell the Harry Potter ebooks on her own starting in October”

Unfortunately, even the best fanfic content usually remains underground, shared among fanfic communities but never distributed at the mainstream level, both for copyright reasons and because plenty of authors and publishers hate the idea of strangers swooping in on their creations.

UK sci-fi/fantasy publisher Angry Robot Books is taking a different approach: this fall it will launch WorldBuilderOnline, where anyone can submit pretty much any sort of Creative Commons-licensed original content based on specific works published by Angry Robot. The best submissions will be repackaged in anthologies and published professionally, “with most of the proceeds going to the creators” according to Angry Robot’s blog announcement.

It’s not just about writing, either. Publishing Director Marc Gascoigne says in the comments to that post that they’ll accept “pretty much anything germane to the world – fiction, articles, maps, gazeteers, encyclopedia entries, faux advertising, music, poetry, and of course artwork and designs of all kinds.”

The first title to be opened up to fans will be the forthcoming “Empire State” by Adam Christopher, which the publisher describes as a prohibition-superhero-noir novel set in an alternate New York City. (You can read an excerpt at Tor.com, and ask Amazon to email you when it becomes available.)

The WorldBuilder site will be managed by Mur Lafferty, a writer and editor who is probably best known for her podcasts over the past seven years (including an audio anthology of short fiction in 2006 featuring stories read by the authors). She’s also got her own superhero novel called “Playing For Keeps”, so she’s especially suited for the launch title of WorldBuilder.

There are other communities where fans are being enlisted to help world build, like

• Baen’s Grantville Gazette based on the works of Eric Flint;
• The Mongoliad, a serialized epic where the original fiction is being provided in part by Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson;
• and Runes of Gallidon, which works a lot like WorldBuilder but sprang into existence without a seminal work.

On the other end of the world building spectrum is J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore, which is intended to provide an immersive online world for fans of the Harry Potter series, but which doesn’t welcome user-generated content.

But Angry Robot’s WorldBuilder concept stands out to me as something fresh for the way it plans to formalize the best fanfic, by publishing it traditionally alongside the original work and then compensating the fans who created it. This in turn may help market the official book, and it could help build an audience for future titles in the series. We won’t know until sometime next year, but maybe Angry Robot has figured out a path forward where fans, authors and publishers can all profit by working together.

Update: If you have specific questions about how WorldBuilder will work, you can ask “Empire State” author Adam Christopher over at his official blog.

In case you need a recap of what this is all about, the Google Books Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) was a proposed agreement arranged by some publishers, authors, and author groups as a way to create a compensation and licensing system for Google Book Search, which uses the full text of copyrighted books to provide snippets in search results. Some authors and publishers claim that what Google is doing with Book Search amounts to widespread copyright infringement instead of fair use. For those authors and publishers who had sued Google, the proposed settlement would have protected them from the risk of losing on fair use grounds if the suit proceeded. More controversially, it would have also implemented an opt-out system (instead of opt-in) for authors, and an arbitration system that favored Google and publishers at the expense of authors’ rights. From a competition perspective, it would have also shielded Google from more lawsuits, while leaving competitors unprotected.

U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin rejected the ASA this past March, noting among other things that it went too far in giving Google special privileges (especially regarding orphaned works), and that the opt-out system was unfair to authors. While that pretty much left it dead in its current state, it also left the door open for Google and the plaintiffs to amend the agreement and try again.

But with yesterday’s rejection of a settlement in Freelance, it looks like there’s no possible way for the ASA to proceed.

Freelance is a class action case from the 90s (actually Tasini v. New York Times), and it involves freelance writers who claimed newspapers didn’t have permission to post their work online without compensation. Its relevance to the ASA is that in both lawsuits, the plaintiffs tried to create a single class out of all authors who might be affected by the issue, and yesterday’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals said that was more or less impossible:

In a 2-1 ruling, the second circuit yesterday held that the district court which approved a settlement between freelance writers and publishers in the class action case known shorthand as Freelance “abused its discretion in certifying the class and approving the Settlement, because the named plaintiffs failed to adequately represent the interests of all class members.”

In really plain language, essentially the judges who rejected Freelance‘s settlement yesterday acknowledged that getting all authors to agree to the same thing is like herding cats, and therefore you can’t put all authors in a single class and claim to represent their collective best interests. There may indeed be no such thing as “collective best interests” when it comes to authors.

So what happens next for Google Book Search? The plaintiffs could move forward with the suit, but it’s a considerable gamble because if they lose, then they’ll have inadvertently expanded the definition of fair use. Personally I think that’s great for society, but it’s not necessarily so great for publishers’ business models, hence their outrage at Google.

Another possible byproduct of the death of the ASA is that Google’s competitors can move forward with their own digitization projects. They’ll be assuming the same risk of lawsuits over copyright that Google is now facing, but at least they now know that Google isn’t about to carve out a special protected arrangement that will give it an unbeatable competitive edge.

(Photo: Aviruthia)

Unlike some Kindle announcements, this one is available immediately, although at launch it will only work on three browsers:

• Safari on iPad
• Safari on desktop
• Chrome

Amazon says that support for other browsers is forthcoming, but doesn’t give a date.

But the important one of course is Safari on iPad. As I mentioned yesterday, Apple has launched a usability attack against its competitors in order to drive more business to iBooks, and the only way around it is to produce a web app that bypasses Apple’s App Store guidelines. Although we already knew that Kobo is working on a similar HTML5 web app to replace its iOS app, and that the Financial Times already has one, Amazon has remained quiet about this topic. The signs were there with the launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive earlier this year, but until today there was no hint that Amazon had this ready to go.

As far as functionality, it’s clear that this is a first attempt, and for now you’ll lose a lot of extra perks if you abandon the iOS app on your iPad:

The downloaded books are stored in a database file in the browser’s cache. On the iPad, there’s no way to access them without jailbreaking or running a third party program on your computer that lets you browse the guts of iOS. On a desktop, the database files are easy to find in your web browser’s cache, but in my brief tests this morning I couldn’t find any easy way to extract the downloaded books from them. It’s much easier to simply download your books from your Amazon Kindle account page or from a Kindle device if you really want backup copies.

Aside from the obvious benefit of sidestepping Apple, a browser based Kindle reader is also good if you’re not at your own PC but want to access your Kindle library. Now you can simply log in through Safari or Chrome and call up your books from anywhere. It’s not perfect—there’s no way to copy and paste text, for instance—but it’s another step forward in making ebooks more accessible regardless of the device you’re using at any given moment.

Check it out for yourself at http://read.amazon.com/

Amazon is crowing that students can save up to 80% on their textbooks by renting them from the Kindle Store, but The Digital Reader did a price comparison on a random textbook and tweeted that it’s still cheaper to buy and then resell a print edition.

I think the more compelling feature is that any notes or highlights will be saved on Amazon’s servers under the customer’s Kindle account, just like other notes and highlights, and will remain available even after the rental period ends.

www.amazon.com/kindletextbooks

If you use a Kindle, you can either authorize ReadBeam to send content directly to your device’s email address, or you can leave it blank and you’ll receive the Kindle-friendly .mobi files directly, which you can then copy over. They don’t always work (the International Herald Tribune was unreadable for me, for example), but hey, it’s not like it has to cost you anything to try it out.

The service is free for now, but on the ReadBeam blog there’s a post from last April that suggests the developer has considered offering some sort of freemium service to let you subscribe to feeds outside the default set. Or you can do it yourself on Calibre, of course.

Around this time last year, Rowling started hinting that she was no longer completely against having official ebook editions, but nothing more came of it other than a few hopeful articles and blog posts.

But today she finally made an official announcement (one that neatly coincides with the growing marketing push for the final movie). She’s come around to ebooks:

“E-books are here and here to stay. Later than a lot of people, I for the first time downloaded ebooks and it’s miraculous for travel and for children in particular. I feel great about taking Harry into this new medium.”

Accordingly, in October she’ll start selling official DRM-free ebook editions and digital versions of the audiobooks from her own website, Pottermore, which will also be a free online reading community that will contain new Potter-related writing that hasn’t been published before.

Some interesting details of the arrangement:

• Rowling will sell the ebooks, not Amazon, B&N, Sony, Kobo, or any other retailer, but they’ll be compatible across all of the major ebook devices.
• Sony will be handling the online community aspects of the site for easier hacking and account thievery. (Oh snap!)
• The cross-compatibility editions will be managed by OverDrive, the company that handles the vast majority of library ebook lending in the U.S.
• The website will soft launch on July 31st with one million members, then launch officially in October with the accompanying ebook store.
• The site will feature newly-commissioned illustrations and interactive experiences, like shopping for a the right wand or being sorted by the Sorting Hat, that you can participate in as you read the corresponding chapters in the books—think of it as an enhanced ebook where all the enhancement is hosted online.

Although the details on translations and regional availability are a little fuzzy, The Globe and Mail says the website will launch in English, French, German and Spanish, and also says that the ebook editions will be made available in multiple languages. I don’t know who owns the ebook rights to HP… (Update: Rowling indeed holds the ebook rights, not her print publishers, reports Wired UK.)

As for the cross-platform compatibility, which I’d say is the real magic Rowling is performing here, my guess is that it will be possible because of Amazon’s upcoming move to work with OverDrive to allow library lending of the Kindle format. This also suggests that Amazon will launch its U.S. library lending program by October. Update: Via The Digital Reader, the ebooks will be DRM-free but watermarked with the purchaser’s identity to dissuade rampant piracy, so it looks like this isn’t dependent upon Amazon’s library lending program after all.

Another mystery is how the online community will work, and what “free” actually gets you in terms of content on Pottermore. The Bookseller notes that Rowling has 18,000 words worth of new content, including some backstory on Professor McGonagall, that will be available exclusively on the new site.

Here is the original article that started the current round-robin of blog posts, thus leaving me in a bad situation where if I ignore it, I’m not being topical, but if I write about it I’m being as ridiculous as the rest. Oh well. I’m usually even more ridiculous.

Out of all the me-too posts that sprang forth from the Great God Internet’s loins over the past few days, this is the best one in terms of supplemental original research:

And here are a few thoughts about the topic, noisily claptrapped out on my keyboard with annoyance this morning because I’d rather find something more fun to write about.

1. This isn’t a new phenomenon. As I mentioned above, people who actually follow this market have been making a similar point since at least last November. The reason this is a story in June 2011 is because a mainstream media (MSM) outlet took an interest in it. Today, for reasons both practical and irrational, there remains a large trust gap between blogs and MSM news organizations, with most information flowing unilaterally from MSM to blogs. For a topic to be taken as newsworthy by most MSM orgs, it must first be identified, (hopefully) researched, and publicly presented on a peer’s news platform—by Reuters, in this instance.

2. This is an undesirable state, but it doesn’t break the Kindle store. In my experience, and I bet I spend more time on the Kindle Store than the average consumer, I almost never come across these spambooks. I’d rather just say “never,” but it’s possible such titles have shown up in the past and I’ve forgotten, which is a clue that they clearly don’t register as an annoyance with me yet. (And I’m easily annoyed; look how irritated I get over a low-level news cycle about a legitimate topic.)

In my opinion, Amazon isn’t doing enough to combat the problem internally, but for now at least there are so many third party websites offering what are essentially free curating services (like what I do with the Amazon Bargains posts, for example) that spam titles aren’t just easy to avoid but actually difficult to find unless you’re diving deep into the Kindle Store. Publishers and authors also kick in a little curation mojo to promote real titles, and barring a massive pandemic of reader stupidity, no spambook will ever crack the two main Top 100 lists on the Kindle Store.

The spam problem is gross because it reminds one that many people are nasty little scavenger beasts who will happily jump onto a carcass and try to drag away a bit of viscera. But if you blog, you see this sort of scavenging all the time anyway from jerks who steal your content, so it’s not new.

And more relevant to this topic, it’s not like I’m having to delete spam from my Kindle each morning. It’s a real issue that in practical terms remains a non-issue.

3. No one has a good solution to prevent it yet. Casey Johnston at Ars Technica mentions one commonly offered solution: that Amazon should charge money to publish on the Kindle. I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t already implemented a fee, but it seems to me that as of right now, Amazon finds it more profitable to let vendors come on board for free and hand over a cut of every sale.

On thing worth noting, however, is that Apple has always required a nontrivial $100 fee before you can submit your apps, and it seemingly hand screens every app submission before allowing it on the App Store, and yet the App Store is lousy with crapware, including public domain content wrapped in a hastily devised iOS shell.

In other words, a $50 fee to publish on the Kindle store, even if it’s refundable, may end up being nontrivial for some real self-publishing authors, but a justifiable expense for a spammer who plans on excreting 150 private label rights ebooks to the store over a two day period.

If Amazon charged the fee for each title submitted, that might have a more effective result—but it would remain a very real obstacle for legit authors too, a perfect example of punishing the honest to try to get at the dishonest.

4. It’s not always so easy to tell what’s fake content and what’s just badly written or ill-conceived content. Sure, the examples in the articles above are easy enough to identify. But unless Amazon/Apple/RetailerX wants to get into the official gatekeeping business—you know, like a real publisher—it’s going to be hard to manually comb through submissions and make a judgment call on whether every “how to improve your finances” title is just a bad purchase or actually spam.

5. This highlights the need for an independent content monitoring tool that authors, publishers and retailers can use. For now, this might look like Amazon’s problem, but it’s a problem any time a retailer opens the submission doors to the public. And private label rights ebooks are only part of the problem—there’s also the issue of people stealing published content and reselling it. Worst of all, unless it threatens to take over a store’s most public areas (which is unlikely), it’s a bigger problem for authors and publishers than for retailers—which means retailers may ultimately say to authors and publishers, “You deal with it.”

It’s hard to root out this sort of theft, and although I suppose there are businesses cropping up to sell you monitoring services, it would be healthier for the publishing industry to create a standalone body to do it. Assuming the key players in modern publishing will never be able to work together to achieve such a mutually beneficial common goal, I think Google or Amazon should create it and then sell it to other businesses as well as individuals.

I assume that publishers would do everything possible to sabotage such a tool unless they were the ones to develop it, probably by arguing that it violated their copyrights. So for the near future we’re stuck with spammers on our ebook stores, and as with spam in email, spam on Twitter, and spammy websites, your best strategy is to simply avoid them when possible, report them when you can, and ignore them the rest of the time.

(Photo: t3rmin4t0r)