Plagiarism is an Ongoing Problem for All Writers and Publishers
I just finished reading a very good article by Adam Penenberg on Fast Company about Amazon’s Plagiarism Problem. Penenberg makes excellent points in his article, exposing just a few blatant plagiarists that are earning money on Amazon through their so-called “published works” which are really out and out, copy and pasted books stolen from other authors.
The article focused on the erotica section, which has a very large internet audience. But those of us who have been writing online for a while can tell you that plagiarism is rampant in all topic areas, including the driest subjects. Plagiarism used to be much harder when books were published through the stringent auspices of large publishing houses, but now that there are so many self-published authors, it is difficult to control how much content is being published new, and how much is being stolen.
While even the best publishers and book sellers can miss some authors who fall through the cracks, with the easy self-publishing available to anyone online, the cracks have grown much, much larger, and plagiarism has become the new focus for spammers. People who are just out to make a quick buck have found an easy way to make money from Amazon and other online book sellers by selling other people’s work under their own name.
One of the interesting issues to come out of all this is the question of whose burden it is to look for and take down the plagiarists. Most authors do not have time or the resources to become plagiarism police, to guard their own work from being stolen. Filtering out every plagiarist is a costly, and labor intensive problem for publishers of self-published books. At this time, Amazon most likely only removes plagiarism that is pointed out by complaints from readers or authors.
What is the solution to all this? I really don’t know, but somehow the technology must be upgraded so that the author needs at minimum to prove their identity when they self-publish. That might not take care of all the plagiarists, but at least it would take care of the people with multiple accounts under different names.
Plagiarism is an Ongoing Problem for All Writers and Publishers originally appeared on Writing Online on January 28, 2012.
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