Why We Need Ebook Police (and It’s Not for Censorship)

One of my favorite professors in undergrad was always talking about how humanity was going to collapse because there were too many kinds of toothpaste: basically, we all want clean, white, healthy teeth, so when faced with thousands of options to achieve one basic goal, it’s just too many choices for most people to navigate. (I feel this way about facial cleansers; there are no less than five in my shower at any given time because I want to make sure I have the one that will give me the smoothest skin. But which one is that??) And even though my professor brought this up more than a decade ago, the analogy has become appropriate for more than he could ever imagine.

How many choices does a reader need for a copy of Ulysses? What’s the difference? Before ebooks, making that choice was easier because you could see the cover, weigh the book, make decisions based on a more intimate view of the product.

This got a little more unwieldy when ebooks first emerged, but overall, all the options were still ok – not unlike the toothpaste. (You know that if it has ADA approval, it can’t be all that bad.) So at first, I knew that any ebook I bought would be close to what I wanted and would get the job done.

Now, I’m not so sure. With the rise of self-publishing, too many people are scanning bad copies of random books – both legally and illegally. Scammers are taking popular books and publishing “guides” that look like the actual books. Content farms are publishing complete trash, documents full of high-profile phrases, then selling them for $.99; users get taken, but don’t think the low price is worth the hassle of a fight. And since there isn’t a book-industry equivalent of the ADA, how can the consumer know the difference?

Below, a search for “Ulysses” was done on the new Nook,  assuming that someone searching for that wants the actual copy of Ulysses written by James Joyce – this should be an easy result. So, which one is that? Why would someone pay $12.99 when there are copies available for $.99? What’s the difference between the books shown?

Here are the results on the Kindle. It doesn’t seem to have the same problems with the self-published books rising to the top, so they must be weighting verified publishers (or at least better copies) more heavily.

Yet neither device indicates which is from a commercial publisher and which is from the self-publishing platform. This is fine when it’s Amanda Hocking, but what about when it’s some jerk publishing a fake Harry Potter with the same sentence written over and over a million times?

There isn’t one solution to helping consumers find and choose the products they actually want. This is going to take a combination of content verification (which is VERY different from censorship), tagging, tweaking of the search algorithm, and editorial curation. Otherwise, it’s going to become impossible to find – or choose – anything.

[UPDATE: Here's a more in-depth and technical article about this from Reuters.]