Kindle spam has been growing fast in the last six months because several online courses and, ironically, ebooks have been released that teach people how to create a Kindle book per day, according to Paul Wolfe, an Internet marketing specialist.
Image via PC World/Quote via www.reuters.com
This is good piece by Alistair Barr on Amazon's growing ebook spam problem. Since Kindle now has a good sized installed base and doesn't charge publishers, there is every incentive in the world to spam this system. So of course... the system is being spammed. People really are predictable. It might be time for Amazon to start curating by bot, human or both.
But is a book that teaches others how to create spam actually spam itself? (so meta)
Over here at TypePad, we had our own flare-up with spam blogs (a/k/a splogs) earlier this year with ne'er-do-wells taking advantage of our free Micro accounts and our Follow feature to make a mess of the joint. We took counter-measures and greatly reduced the problem. First, we now require all of our Micro users to authenticate with Facebook Connect. This radically curbed the number of sploggers entering the system. Then we gave our users a much needed Block feature and lastly we did some internal housekeeping to monitor, find and eliminate the worst offenders.
So far so good! But of course we have to remain vigilant because if you build it they will spam.
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