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Books are published - either by a publisher, or by the author. That's the equivalent of a 'checksum'.

The author should be able to provide to Amazon/Goodreads a list of publishers for their book. Any publisher not on this list should be prevented from selling the title.

If someone wants to impersonate an author, they'd have to also impersonate a publisher - a much bigger legal risk.

Simple solution.



For many self published authors there is just one publisher: Amazon itself.


Perfect! So Amazon would be encouraged to police itself, which benefits everyone.


Not really: unlike traditional publishers, Amazon presents itself as just a printing on demand service. They don't have any objective in policing users of their service.




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