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Amazon Kindle Spam: Direct Publishing System Gets Gummed By Influx Of Junk eBooks

From the Huffington Post:

The wave of ebook spam crashing over the Kindle could undermine [Amazon's] push into self-publishing.

Here spam refers to crap ebooks or plagiarized content, uploaded to Amazon only to make a quick profit. According to James McQuivey, an eReader analyst at Forrester Research, the solution to the problem is a form of Amazon social networking.

If the company can let readers see book recommendations from people they know, or people whose reviews they liked in the past, that would help them track down the content they want and avoid misleading recommendations.

That sounds a whole lot like Goodreads, an existing social network for readers.

Perhaps Amazon's new enforcement of community guidelines (including deleting sock puppet reviews and spam book announcements) is phase one of Amazon's new, more valuable, social networking system.


The Real Force Behind Ebook Sales: Heaving Bosoms

FoxNews.com provides a nice collection of tired cliches about romance readers, including referencing romance fiction as "salacious chick lit". Fox has evidently just discovered romance drives the fiction market.

The Hottitude of Servitude

A new book examining the imagery of the slavegirl in movies and television has just been released on Kindle. Here's a snippet of the summary:

The Hottitude of Servitude looks at every kind of slavegirl look from the baggy, shapeless tunics popular for female slavegirls of the Italian sword and sorcery movies known as peplum to the general nakedness of slavegirls in 1980s big-hair-and-bare-breasts sword and sandal movies such as Barbarian Queen and all points in between. While we're at it we'll take plenty of opportunity to snark at the movies that provide the slavegirl imagery, taking time to enjoy such phenomena as the Stupidest Civil Engineering Project in the History of Civilization (from Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon) the Triangles of Death and the Irregular Polygons of Doom from (from Taur and the Amazon Women) Most Thoroughly Deposed King Ever (from Deathstalker) and many, many other snarkworthy products of such movies.

In addition, there will be semi-genuine contributions to film theory, in the form of the Grand Unified Cheese Theory, which is nothing less than a theory that allows filmmakers to create stories that will be appealing to audiences, even without great writing or directing skills!

So we have slavegirls ogled, hilariously bad films snarked and Grand Unified Cheese Theory, all rolled into a book that is exactly the same kind of guilty pleasure as its subject matter, but with a light patina of intellectual nattering to make it seem almost respectable.

If Hottitude of Servitude is half as clever as the description, the book is a must read!

Happy Anniversary Carina Press!

In honor of Carina's first anniversary celebration, the Carina blog is offering a grand prize of a Kobo ereader (the original model) and 12 Carina Press digital titles. All you need to do to be entered to win is comment on the Carina blog. They will ship internationally.

The Carina Press team is also doing a whirlwind blog tour on twenty Carina authors’ blogs. On each blog, leave a comment and be entered to win a download of a Carina Press book. The list of contest blogs is also listed on the Carina Press Blog.