Coming soon to your e-book reader: spam

So now we have e-books and e-book readers and, of course, e-spam. Yes, Amazon has shone the spotlight on the spam e-books that are now available for purchase for Amazon's own e-reader, the Kindle.

Kind of makes you want to skip the whole e-reading phenomenon, doesn't it? I mean, really. Haven't we had enough spam with TV ads and newspaper inserts and magazine "advertorials" and — the king of all spam domains — email? Oh, wait, there's the World Wide Web as well, and all those flashing lights and dancing bears and other elements of distraction that make us take our eye off the virtual ball. Web pages are supposed to be informative or fun or at least semi-entertaining, but they tend to be not so much of any of those things if the entire experience is diminished by distractions.

The same is true of reading a book. I guess the difference here is that the entire book is spam. We're not to the point yet where we have ads in the margins of e-books: "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." — "Take our medicine to help you feel better!"

That sort of thing might be happening on a small scale — meaning not in every case — but the case being referred to here is that of the entire contents of a "volume" being an ad, group of dancing bears, plea for money from an unnamed undeveloped country, etc. I guess that's inevitable.

The more worrying element of Amazon's report, though, is the admission that some e-books are repackaged versions of originals under different author's names — meaning piracy. Now that's downright theft. We're not talking plagiarism here, for which an author lifts thoughts, words, or whole passages from one book and passes it off as his or her own; no, this is more insidious in that an "author" has taken all of another person's work, copied it into a new document, and placed a different name under Author. That is heinous. Worse, the thief will profit from someone else's intellectual property.

Not much Amazon can do about this, though, unless they want to get into the business of copyright law and lawsuits on such. Caveat emptor would definitely apply, as would caveat actor, the Latin equivalent of "writer beware."

Imitation might be a sincere form of flattery, but it shouldn't lead to profit at someone's else expense.