Home

Amazon Kindle eBooks targeted by scammers

25.04.11

With somewhere on the order of one million titles available through the Amazon Kindle store, you can be assured that there is likely something for everyone’s reading tastes to be found. You can be equally sure that no one at Amazon has read every title on their virtual shelves.  Nor should they have to; while history is replete with incidents of people trying to bowdlerize the content of reading material, there have always been bookshops that were willing to fight the good fight and make available content that some segment of society has found objectionable.

But eBooks have one feature that can’t be found in print; the ability to have live hotlinks embedded in the text.  And while, for the moment, e-readers have only minimal browsing capabilities, every major e-reader has an app that can run on your phone or computer.

Now I’m not concerned that publishers are embedding malicious hotlinks in their text; my tinfoil hat isn’t quite that tight, but the Kindle store also supports a thriving community of what used to be called “vanity” publishing.  Self-publishing your books to the Kindle store is now easily done, as was outlined by our Larry Dignan back in January.  And the issue here is that the eBook can contain more than just text.