How much would it cost Amazon to assess the value of each book uploaded to Kindle? Some AI process could be trained on "real" vs "scam" books and attach a score, then humans could review the worst scores and then maybe investigate the authors who post a majority of bad books.<p>Even after the fact, once a book is generating profits in the Kindle store, one can think of many automated controls:<p>1. It shouldn't matter that the old Kindles can't tell the pages you've read (just the max page you reached), if the new ones can, because then, based on the data from the newer Kindles, one can detect books where people only read the first and last page (and then maybe investigate those books manually)<p>2. Even if no Kindle device was able to tell the pages you've read, if it's possible to measure the speed at which a reader reached the last page (date book first opened - date last page read), then by comparing to similar books of similar size it should not be difficult to identify outliers<p>3. Etc.<p>My point is, for some reason Amazon doesn't want to police itself, neither in the Kindle store nor in the general store (third-party sellers), which is bad for its brand.<p>This is puzzling because it's irrational, and one would think Jeff Bezos is more of the hyper-rational type...<p>So a piece of the puzzle is missing, but I can't see it.