Kindle Fraud

1 April 2011, 2225 EDT

A large and growing problem, apparently. Via Jim MacDonald, who brings greater publicity to the plight of S.K.S. Perry, a self-published author who discovers that his book is already being sold by someone else on Amazon… and finds that Amazon doesn’t seem to give a damn.

Many of our readers our academics who, I assume, have discovered — or will soon discover if they use the right search terms — that their own books are available in the form of illegal downloads. This suggests that repackaging as someone else’s e-book, if it hasn’t happened, is in many a recent academic book’s near future.

Of course, those of us who don’t write about Zombies or produce trade books make little money from royalties anyway. Still, I find the whole thing disturbing on a personal level, let alone on the grounds of general ethics. These trends also bode ill for the already reduced world of academic publishing.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.