Content farms target eBooks
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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Content farms are rearing their ugly heads again; and this time they have their sights on eBooks. Jan Knight recently reported on the controversial issue of content farms – businesses which hire contractors to write web content, often of low quality, based on the popularity of keywords in search engines. Content farms are seen by many as a threat to traditional journalism and in fact Google, stung by criticism of poor quality search results, in February this year changed its algorithm to reduce the rankings of low quality sites.

Now paidContent has alerted us to a new phenomenon, which some will see as content theft. The popularity of eBooks  – in the US, eBooks outsold paper books in January and the relentless pace of eReaders and digital books continues – has led to some individuals acquiring eContent , repackaging it or reproducing it illegally and then selling it on. In one extreme case, an author found his book on Amazon under another name. More frequently, free public domain content available on sites such as Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg,  is reproduced and sold on to hapless customers.

As the author of the paidContent article points out, the concept of Private Label Rights (PLR) content is exacerbating the problem: PLR, often used for marketing purposes, is royalty-free and therefore allows anybody to buy the content and do with it what they will. The issue of copyright comes into the discussion, when consumers purchase PLR content which unbeknownst to them has been plagiarised or copied without permission.

This all begs the question of how authors can protect their eContent, and raises the topic of copyright in a digital age – an issue mentioned on LiveWire in connection with the British Library’s digitisation project.

This week, the British Library announced it was collaborating with Google to make 250,000 out-of-copyright books, mainly from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, available online. All full texts will be downloadable via Google Books. So, next time you purchase a book on the industrial revolution or the Crimean War make sure you haven’t been ripped off – check the British Library or Google Books first!

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