Here’s an interesting tale up on a British news site. In short, an author discovered that a couple books she had co-authored years ago had been directly plagiarized and republished under different titles. The theft was caught and the royalties that had been generated from Amazon sales were routed to the correct authors. All’s well that ends well.

The thief however was never really caught. He or she published under what was likely a pseudonym and no flesh and blood person can be connected to the name.

In a way, the scheme is rather obvious. There are millions of under-the-radar books out there—books that have been forgotten or never had much of a fan base. Why not publish them under a new title and try and reap the benefits? (Well, if you ignore the ethical reasons.)

I wonder if down the line it will be easy enough to get software to do all the dirty work. You design a piece of software to create thousands of fake accounts and then upload pilfered books to the Amazon store using these accounts? Maybe you don’t make much but something is more than nothing.