Amazon.com is cracking down on people who manipulate its e-book self-publishing platform, a move that follows the e-commerce giant’s effort to better police its product reviews.
The Seattle company last week filed five complaints with a private arbitration service, seeking orders barring specific users of its Kindle e-book platform from trying to manipulate the system for financial gains.
Among Amazon’s contentions: Users posted fake reviews and offered for sale duplicate copies of books to boost a publisher’s rating, and some people sold “click farming” services to authors in a bid to artificially inflate readership totals and royalty payouts.
Amazon has created vast marketplaces for goods, primarily through its eponymous online store that hosts its own sales as well as listings from other companies. The company counts on its related reviews and product rankings to boost the legitimacy of its site in the eyes of consumers.
Worried about the corrosive impact of fake product reviews, Amazon since 2015 has been cracking down on reviews it believes are illegitimate.
Critics have for years also complained that Kindle’s self-publishing apparatus was being abused.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesman said a “small minority” of Kindle self-publishers “engage in fraud to gain an unfair competitive advantage.”
Amazon allows anyone to self-publish e-books through its Kindle Direct Publishing platform.
Authors can select a specific price to set their book for sale, or opt into programs that let users who pay a monthly fee read an unlimited selection of books, or, in the case of the Amazon Prime membership program, read books from a selection in a digital lending library.
Self-published authors who participate in the free reading programs are paid from a royalty fund that Amazon gathers monthly, with payouts varying based on the number of readers each book earns.
It’s that mechanism in particular that has been the subject of abuse, Amazon says.
Complaints say Nilmer Rubio, a resident of the Philippines, and Thomas Glenn, of Miami, offered authors services to inflate reads in exchange for kickbacks.
Terrance Li, of Ontario, Canada, and Alexis Pablo Marrocco, of Argentina, posted reviews Amazon believes are fake, the company’s complaints said.
Marrocco was the subject of a 2015 Washington Post story on the gray area between legitimate business and scams among Kindle entrepreneurs. In comments to the newspaper, he denied violating Amazon’s rules.
And Kindle accounts registered to Jake Dryan, of Great Britain, or his companies created duplicate copies of books and click farms to boost the rankings of certain books, Amazon’s complaint says.
All of those activities are barred by Amazon’s rules, the company says.
The people named in Amazon’s complaints couldn’t be reached for comment, or didn’t immediately respond to messages.
Amazon’s complaints are requests for arbitration hearings overseen by the American Arbitration Association.
