Kindle’s Spurious Atlantis Books

?Kindle’s Spurious Atlantis Books. Last Sunday (15/8/21) I was checking Amazon UK to see if any Atlantis-related books were due for publication. There appeared to be, so I downloaded Atlantis the Lost City by Katie Robben. On opening it I found that the text was rotated 90° and unfinished. I looked again at Amazon and found that there were others with similar content and two that had plagiarised content from Paul Dunbavin’s Towers of Atlantis. I contacted Paul, who emailed Kindle alerting them to the situation. He got an automated reply promising a further response within one or two days. Nothing has been heard since. I waited to post this until some answer had been received, but as none has been forthcoming, so as of this morning (19th), because of Kindle’s tardiness all of these spurious books are still listed.

 I list here the titles and alleged authors involved

Atlantis the Lost City  Katie Robben

Atlantis: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible  Dominique Brassard

The Mystery of Atlantis  Jarrett Monahan

The Lost Empire of Atlantis  Julie Elahi

Finding Atlantis  Herb Pulford *

The Lost Atlantis Discovered  Bernie Glaser *

Secret of Atlantis Dylan Albritton

To me, it seems that Kindle’s vetting of authors and material before publication is badly flawed. I would expect that there is plagiarism detection software available to them Furthermore, I would like to remind readers that 5 years ago, The Mystery of Atlantis was published under the name of John Lock. However, on opening it, I found the content to be a badly scanned copy of Spanuth’s Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled. It had been published by CreateSpace, an Amazon Company! Also keep in mind that I was only searching under ‘Plato Atlantis’ filtered by ‘publication date’, so what else is lurking in other parts of the huge Kindle stock.

A final tip is to always use the ‘Look Inside’ feature.

Just over a week has passed since I first wrote about this spurious book problem. Since then the situation has not improved with all the books listed above still on offer at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. Paul Dunbavin, whose work has been plagiarised, has received nothing but automated responses to his complaints.

But the situation is even worse. In the hope of evoking a human response from Amazon, I went on to Amazon.com and wrote one-line reviews for three (2, 3. and 4 listed above) of the offending titles denouncing them as plagiarised. A couple of days later I duly received three automated ‘thank you’s from Amazon and sure enough we now have those three titles reviewed as fakes. I shall now proceed with ‘reviewing’ the other four titles.

When I first stumbled on this problem, I had no idea that what I found was part of a much larger situation, that is until Dunbavin sent me the link below^(a). It is now clear that Amazon (and others) are overly dependent on computers to replace humans so when it comes to dealing with problems such as plagiarism, they don’t seem to care!

>In January 2022 I had reason to check Amazon UK again searching under ‘Plato Atlantis’ and filtered by ‘Publication Date’ and within minutes found that matters seem little changed. Two of the books that I identified months were still on sale and are marked above with a red asterisk as well as at least three others. I must reiterate that Amazon doesn’t seem to care.

CAVEAT EMPTOR<

^(a) Fake, Counterfeit And Pirated Books On Amazon (justpublishingadvice.com)