Info 202 Fall 2011

    I found several
articles related to e-book issues after reading "Publisher Limits Shelf
Life for Library E-Books." Among them, I was most intrigued by the article
titled "Amazon Cracks Down on Some E-Book Publishers."
It describes the downsides of inundation of e-books although e-books paved the
way for people to publish easily. Under the concept of "private label
rights," someone writes something and then sells the rights to others, who
repackage it under their own name and title. However, the new owner is not likely
to change the original text, which results in too many redundant e-books in the
Kindle store. A search on ‘Kindle marketing’ in the Kindle store turned up
12,990 results. Amazon started cracking down on e-book publishers and tried to
kick them out from the Kindle store.

     With e-book self-publishing system, a reader has more wide variety of
book collection in market; on the other hand, e-book does not guarantee any
minimum level of quality and authenticity. In paper book publication, because it
costs a lot for printing and marketing, publishers have to select books to print
carefully. Through such a “curation,” the quality of books is maintained. In
producing e-books, however, anyone can publish a book simply by “formatting”
with no need of “writing”: one e-book publisher made a book by just copying the
Wikipedia contents. This undiscriminating flood of publishing leads to the
degradation of overall quality, and, in result, readers will disregard them.
Customers also could not distinguish which one is original among many Copy Cats
and who is a real author. Before
we are lost in the Babel of e-books, we should solve those problems by the
third party intervention or self-purification.