Worth Stealing?

[ThinkerX]

Came across this on one of the news sites I frequent.

Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?

Mr. Hannaham was just one of countless targets in a mysterious international phishing scam that has been tricking writers, editors, agents and anyone in their orbit into sharing unpublished book manuscripts. It isn’t clear who the thief or thieves are, or even how they might profit from the scheme. High-profile authors like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan have been targeted, along with celebrities like Ethan Hawke. But short story collections and works by little-known debut writers have been attacked as well, even though they would have no obvious value on the black market.

In fact, the manuscripts do not appear to wind up on the black market at all, or anywhere on the dark web, and no ransoms have been demanded. When copies of the manuscripts get out, they just seem to vanish. So why is this happening?

 

[pmmg]

I dont care if nothing comes of it but probably something will. I know of a scam where lesser known authors, such as myself, have works lifted from self published sites, names changes and then republished from different authors. The assumption being the original author will never know and others can profit on work not their own.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I'm guessing they're going for a high volume, low cost approach. When self-publishing, the amount of works you put out is related to how much money you make, both overall, but also per individual work. After all, if someone likes one of your books, there's a chance they'll read the next one. And this is a way to quickly put out a lot of works. If you have little-to-no investment then you can make decent money doing this. If you have 100 works out, sell one of each a day for $2 profit then you make a pretty good living.

Also, there is pretty much no downside. The worst that can happen is that a writer complains. Amazon then bans them and that's it. I doubt many writers would file any theft charges (if they even can) or that any one of the crimes is big enough for anyone to really take action against them. So, they get away with it. Then, they simply open up a new account and repeat the same thing again. It's easy money.

Of course, Amazon could fairly quickly put a stop to this by implementing some basic plagiarism detection. But they have no incentive to do so. After all, they make money of all the sales of the scammers and they don't get in trouble for having the works on their site. After a complaint just ban and move on.