Amazon's Pirated Copy of MAID
A self-published "Biography" is a slightly reworded version of my first memoir.
Ahead of my first memoir’s five-year pub date anniversary, I did some inventory of the copies of books I had on hand, including foreign copies. It’d been a while since I looked up how many languages MAID had been published in, and I counted several times to make sure I got the total correct. Thirty??! My personal copies did not amount to that number. They were supposed to, since every contract with a foreign publisher includes a few author copies. It appeared I was missing seven.
After emailing my foreign rights agent to inquire about the editions I hadn’t yet received, I began to do my own search for them online. Searching for my books on Amazon usually brings up a few interesting results. Over the years, people have published various “summaries” of my book, which remind me of the Cliff Notes I used in college. Recently, however, I have noticed people are self-publishing what they call a “biography” of Stephanie Land. Intrigued, I purchased ones available in a printed version.
Several of these wouldn’t garner a Wikipedia editor’s approval. Many amount to less information than what is listed on my actual Wikipedia page, and their claims are mostly incorrect. One I purchased recently said I was born in 1980, for instance, and called my hometown in Washington State a “hamlet.” For the most part, these give me a good chuckle, possibly some content for social media, and I toss them onto a pile of rogue copies of my books in my closet.
Yesterday, after getting to the pile of mail I’d accrued after traveling for work over the last two weeks, I opened a package from Amazon that contained a biography of me titled Stephanie Land: One Author’s Struggle Against Socioeconomic Barriers. This book had a heftiness to it that the others didn’t. I raised my eyebrows as I flipped through it, aghast that anyone would have enough information about me to fill 180 pages. Then I began to notice it was written in the first person.
My book, or rather, the book I wrote and published in January of 2019, begins with the line, “My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.” This “biography,” supposedly authored and self-published by a person named Brandi L. Sahlfeld, begins with “In a homeless shelter, my daughter began to walk.” It has a table of contents without page numbers and identical chapter titles, but every sentence in the book is ever-so-slightly reworded down to ending with “I suppose they’re both in and of themselves” instead of my own “I guess they’re in and of the same.”
Immediately, I took photos of the book, its contents—including the “Copyright” page, and sent them in rapid succession to my agent, publisher, and lawyer before posting the photos on my personal Facebook page and Threads. On closer inspection, it seemed the book was condensed slightly as well as modified, but seemed to contain the entire story.
The author, whether she is a real person or not, appeared to have two other books, self-published on December 1st and 2nd and for sale on Amazon, listed at $15.59 and $15.95, which are also biographies of similar lengths. One on Johnny Marr is a slim 140 pages compared to the 512-page autobiography he authored and published in 2017. Her other book is on Will Guidara, whose original memoir is about a hundred pages longer than the “biography” she has listed for sale. Neither of these listings have previews of the content, but I can only assume they are also pirated copies.
Just a quick google search shows that Amazon’s self-publishing platform has an intellectual property theft problem. Kara Swisher also noticed “dozens and dozens” of AI-generated biographies of her for sale on Amazon after her recent book was published. When The Washington Post reached out to the Author’s Guild for comment, executive director Mary Rasenberger said “I think we are going to be dealing with an explosion of AI-generated books before we get anywhere near fixing the problem.”
The “explosion” is real. Many authors have had short, error-filled biographies published about them, and Jane Friedman was horrified to discover that books she did not write (but listed her as the author) were populating her Goodreads and Amazon profiles last August. While these listings can be reported and given one-star reviews, it is difficult to have the book removed from the site completely.
Aside from my publisher contacting Amazon to demand the listings be removed, my only legal recourse, according to lawyers, appears to be a demand letter. A fucking pithy cease and desist. I suppose, speaking out about it publicly is also effective, or at least does something. I have tried to tamper down the feelings of heartbreak over the sight of my words, rearranged and published under someone else’s name brings.
Since I was a kid, I’ve dreamt of holding a book I wrote in my hands. Doing that has been something I take pride in, something I never miss a moment to be in awe of, especially knowing that decades of work went into that achievement. The fact that a computer program slightly modified my words and allowed someone else to claim them as their own is something I never thought would be possible, both from a technological standpoint and a moral one.
Yet, here we are.
After I learned MAID was listed as one of the books to train AI, the technology to write entire books in my voice seemed inevitable. But the attack on my dignity as an artist is a sharp, painful stab in my side. What’s worse, there doesn’t seem to be much I, or any artist, for that matter, can do about it.
Until next time.
xo,
-step.
Appalling.
Disgusting, but not surprising. Every screenplay you can think of has been packaged and is on sale by Amazon with the name of some guy who's making $ off bogus claims. It's shocking that Amazon wouldn't require at minimum a copyright in order to sell on any of their platforms. Seems basic. I'm so sorry this is happening.