While the focus of Amazon’s new content duplication policy for the Kindle Store is clearly an effort to eliminate the Kindle spam that has become an ongoing problem for customers, it has a couple less obvious effects that work to the advantage of both the company and the customers. Much of the speculation regarding how the Kindle Store could be cleared of worthlessly repetitive content revolved around the most efficient and advantageous methods that they might have available and clearly an interesting one was found.
The most obvious change, though not entirely new, is to the out of copyright publication. Perhaps the biggest problem that these have posed many consumers is their variety. Now, normally variety is always a good thing. When you know that the content you are acquiring is going to be the same no matter where you get it, however, having ten, twenty, or even fifty versions of the same thing to choose from is simply not helpful. The in-text annotation and added content that one expects with the many different print editions available to choose from do not translate well to the Kindle experience just yet. Amazon has done quite well in the past few months at reducing the clutter among these titles, but with the apparent automation of the duplicate-checking that they now have in place it will be that much easier and more reliable.
They have also done a great job of ensuring the most up to date content library available for Kindle customers. While it would be illegal and quite definitely against all policy to post a stolen work to the Kindle Store, it has not been an unknown occurrence. Since I started publishing through them, I have personally had three books stolen and attributed to other authors and I know that I am far from the worst affected. Now, so long as I am the first one to upload my work, there is no need to worry about it. Not only does this do an excellent job of protecting authors and simplifying the review process for Amazon, since they no longer have to worry about nearly as many theft complaints, it gives further incentive for all self-publishing authors to head to the Kindle Direct Publishing first.
If only to save on the headache of dealing with verifications and lost sales due to delays, authors will likely now feel that much more inclined to give the Kindle priority. After all, once it is up on the Kindle Store, nobody else should be able to post that content unless the original posting is removed first. Why risk having to go through the trouble of eliminating an illegal copy made by somebody who downloaded the work elsewhere?
Overall, while I can see specific situations where taking the review process out of human hands could result in over-enforcement, this will do a lot to improve the shopping experience for Kindle owners. It will do even more to protect authors. When you take those two groups and keep them happy, it makes life easier for Amazon and makes it even more likely that people new to publishing will choose the KDP. This would seem to be wins all around.
My only concern with this cleanup (and it’s been my concern since they started culling the public domain titles), is whether they will consider differences in quality before they remove or refuse a title. Much of the cheap or free PD work in the Kindle Store is still poorly formatted and full of errors, without a real table of contents, etc. Corrections and improved formatting may not be “new content,” but they are a reason to prefer one edition over another.