Another Pirated Story on Amazon?

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I just read an sample on Amazon of a story that I read here. I don't remember the name here or the author here but this Amazon 'author' has placed 5 books in the last month; two in this series. The story is about two secret agents with the sidekick swapping consciousness with a woman and goes undercover as her. It was a story I never finished but he/she is sold to a drug lord on a ship.

It has the look and feel of a similar theft of a couple months back. I don't want to cause problems for a legitimate author so I don't know whether to link to the book and author or not. What do you all suggest?

Katie

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It is always good to ask

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Frank's picture

I would keep in mind that some authors may choose to use their real name when publishing their stories.

Noting the name of the story and author also would be helpful of course ;)

{{Hugs}}

Oh, completely unrelated this kitty in my avatar was named Katelyn (Katybug) that's a baby picture :)

Hugs

Frank

Difficult

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erin's picture

Not enough info to make any sort of meaningful comment. If you don't want to post it publicly, can you send the links to the Amazon books to me privately?

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Rip off stories on Amazon

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erin's picture

Yeah, those appear to be rip off stories because they use the non-Latin letters trick. Lower case bi and bl are actually Cyrillic letters and lower case p is a Greek rho. I checked the sample text on that one and on one other one supposedly by the same author.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

I'd suggest

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Sammi's picture

that whether or not the post on amazon is a plagiarised story, or the author has posted under another name, on this I cannot comment because while the plot seems familiar there is just not enough to go on.

The only one that would be irked buy your post would be the wrong doer having light shined on their actions, and I'd like to think that any author that is posting at sites like here at BCTS or legitimately selling their works on Amazon would be grateful that the interests of all authors are being looked after by readers.


"REMEMBER, No matter where you go, There you are."

Sammi xxx

I suspect ...

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... the writer referred to is Chloe Princess or perhaps the oddly named Chole Pricens (sic). I've had a look at the previews and noticed the odd characters that don't match the rest of the letters in the font which is always a sign that the text has been stolen and the some characters of a different font found/replaced before posting.

Just do a search for either of those names and you'll find the ebooks with a questionable source. I didn't recognise any of the stories in this case but I have in the past. I just find it despicable that anyone would try to profit from the work of others. I haven't written much but I have done a fair bit of edit/proofing for others and I know how much time and effort can go into what might seem even a short story.

Robi

As has been already said

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that story is here as Scarlet.

I agree that doing this is despicable and editing is a big portion of a readable story.

Can someone give me examples of the odd characters that have been referred to. I hesitated to name the story, 'author', or a link with no more than a feeling.

... but AFAIK ...

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... Scarlet is unfinished. I wonder if the plagiariser has done a little work for him/herself and completed the story :)

There are several ebooks by the same 'supplier'. Anyone recognise the others? My only cue was the font replacement and that was enough for me to keep clear.

Robi

Stupid Font Tricks

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erin's picture

Here are some of the letters I have seen used in these bogus books;

Greek rho=ρ vs p

Russian letters: В vs B; р vs p; Ы vs bl; Ь vs b

I've seen a couple of others, too.

They look enough like standard font letters to be easily read for their substitutions but they fuck up the text searching algorithm that Amazon uses to see if people have posted a story for free somewhere. The easiest one to spot visually is the bl digraph because Ы stands out as not being the same font. (It's actually a Russian/Cyrillic character for a vowel something close to an English i or y.)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

That character

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The first part, the 'b', is a 'voice', a linguistics term meaning very roughly a softening/adding 'h' indicator. Today's trivia brought to you by...

Seriously, this whole thing pisses me off. I have seen my own stuff ripped off several times, and once read an exchange on a forum where someone, in all 'innocence', asked where they could go to read my stuff for free. (Hint: here. Erin and the site thus get a little bit of revenue). One reply mentioned the FBI, and used words like theft, and I cannot disagree. My books sell for the price of a supermarket sandwich, and considering the length of some of them, I think that's not a bad price. But I am speaking of theft.

This Amazon thing, though, is different, because we aren't talking about taking a sandwich from a shelf but of emptying the store. Unless we have a pen name in operation (unlikely with Erin's spotting of the typography tricks) we are speaking of utter scum.

The odd characters are a trick by plagiarists

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Basically they use Greek symbols that are extremely close in form to actual English letters. They use some form of text editor and replace letters like 'b' with symbols that are close enough to make the text appear readable if slightly abnormal. This method can fool a lot of text comparison software that looks for exact sentence matches in order to determine if something is plagiarized. So essentially to the naked eye it looks weird but readable...but to the analysis software the documents are different enough to pass as a new document.

Just checked Amazon myself

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From what I saw, the "author" is Chloe Princess. The story, except for the different letters, appears the same. The most interesting thing, though, is that there is a second book of the same character's adventures, also with the switched letters.

Grammar

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Even has the same mistakes, such as "pour" instead of "pore".

given

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Maddy Bell's picture

Everyone's detective work on this has anyone actually reported this to Amazon - in my experience they are very keen to rid their operation of such plagiarists and the added information with the Cyrillic and Greek letters would prove invaluable in stopping this way of beating the bots.


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Madeline Anafrid Bell

I would think

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They would change the algorythm to look for 95% or more similarities instead of 100% similarity and then more closely look at those that are not 100% tfor the tell tale signs.

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I would think they'd do some

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I would think they'd do some contextual searches for those letters in the first place. If it's written in English and is using Greek or Cyrillic characters, it should be a huge BING BING BING warning.

I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Reported to Amazon

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erin's picture

Reported to Amazon by two different channels.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Search

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I also just searched for Chloe etc and found no trace of her. I do believe the message has been received, inwardly digested and, er, passed on.

Does anyone know?

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If Jessica ever finished scarlet anywhere? If seen it posted in several places but it always ends at chapter 12....

BitStream

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