Sad: Laura Miller reports on the glut of spammy content being sold as e-books.
Do not doubt, either, that book spammers will find their way around plagiarism detectors just as email spammers seem able to defy the most vigilant filters. Take, for example, the supremely banal How to Plan and Budget a Family Vacation, currently available from the Kindle store in its [Private Label Rights] form as the work of Debra Pauling. Someone named Shafiq Shah has published the same book under the title How to Manage Holidays With Family, altering the text by running it through some kind of processor, perhaps translating it from English to a foreign language and back again?
Whatever Shah did to How to Plan and Budget a Family Vacation, the result is a bizarre yet strangely appealing word salad. Behold the opening sentences: “The unit holiday has been portrayed in umpteen ways. From National Lampoon’s ‘Holiday’ showing the trials and tribulations of the Griswold pedigree trying to get to ‘Saphead Humans’ to ‘The Zealous Alfresco’ with Gospels Candy and his clan transaction out a cabin in the woods only to showdown a meddling carry.”