I think I have the answer, and it's a lot less interesting than it appears at face value.
These titles are created by an IT company that is selling software / services. The software appears to do platform price matching / analytics, and one of those is on Amazon.
My understanding / assumption is that it appears that if they are a high frequency sellerid paired to their developerid, then they can increase their requests per second (http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_...) either by requesting a change, or maybe via background quotas set by Amazon.
The IT company has some promotional stuff, and they indicate a number of VM's using multiple public IPs to avoid throttling, and in addition:
> [as a top seller we get 8 rp/s, instead of the newbie 0.5 rp/s against 20 items per request]
I went through some of the sellers, and noted some have some complete shite ratings, but that their ratings are consistently at a certain value even over 30/90/12 months. Lifetime values are highly skewed as it appears they pre-stuffed the hat. So for every real person that gets screwed by a cancelled order, they create a number of fake reviews.
So my conclusion based on what I see is that this is their place-holder author, each of the clients they've sold this to has a store front stocked with these titles, the clients generate a ton of fake sales at a reduced price, request a quota increase as "we're a large seller", and then happily do whatever system gaming they actually intended to do.
I could go further down this rabbit hole, but this hypothesis has been exhausted. I wish I was this interested in my actual job.
Different kind of scam. Those books are fillable forms -- the medical titles have pages of generic questions like "how often should I take <some medication>" and "can you take <some medication> with food", with large spaces for the reader to write an answer. The books aren't specific to the medication at all, as evidenced by the fact that they're full of irrelevant questions (like asking if an antiparasitic drug is addictive).
The business titles in the second SERP look similar -- they're poorly formatted scoring systems or checklists.
So yeah. Those books look "legitimate" inasmuch as they are at least intended to be bought by real people believing that they are useful, rather than as a means of money laundering. The content of the books is heavily templated to the point of making the books not worth their selling price, but that's a separate issue.
I stumpled upon Blokdijk last week when looking for resources on setting up Cyrus IMAP. I don't think this is a simple money laundering scam after looking further into it.
I found the full text elsewhere and it's basically 215+ pages of boilerplate/generated questions with blank answers to fill in. Complete nonsense. It's not only sold on Amazon, but on several other otherwise-not-that-dodgy sites as well.
The author even has an Australia-based business selling "licenses", "certifications", "professional development" etc. Blokdijk/Blokdyk (he spells his name inconsistently) looks like a typical conman with a small number of Schroedinger accomplices and blindsided useful idiots.
I get the vibe that if you sign up with them, you end up as a "consultant"/"affiliate"/"coach" spending your time acquiring new nodes in the network... Maybe there's a scammy MLM-component, maybe not, it's not spelled out, but I've seen that before even when it's not obvious from anything public.
I'd be surprised if their business would hold up to legal scrutiny.
And given that, who are these purchasers of his books on Amazon, then? I can't imagine anyone genuinely buying this and not asking for a refund. Is it just him buying from himself to boost his image, or are they that good at selling snake-oil?
This is the most clever piracy-scam site I've seen. Note how the title is generated from the query and post dates are dynamically set so the earliest is old while the most recent is yesterday.
It's quite poetic how these assisted auto-content generating scams are chaining on to each other (:
These titles are created by an IT company that is selling software / services. The software appears to do platform price matching / analytics, and one of those is on Amazon.
My understanding / assumption is that it appears that if they are a high frequency sellerid paired to their developerid, then they can increase their requests per second (http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_...) either by requesting a change, or maybe via background quotas set by Amazon.
The IT company has some promotional stuff, and they indicate a number of VM's using multiple public IPs to avoid throttling, and in addition:
> [as a top seller we get 8 rp/s, instead of the newbie 0.5 rp/s against 20 items per request]
I went through some of the sellers, and noted some have some complete shite ratings, but that their ratings are consistently at a certain value even over 30/90/12 months. Lifetime values are highly skewed as it appears they pre-stuffed the hat. So for every real person that gets screwed by a cancelled order, they create a number of fake reviews.
So my conclusion based on what I see is that this is their place-holder author, each of the clients they've sold this to has a store front stocked with these titles, the clients generate a ton of fake sales at a reduced price, request a quota increase as "we're a large seller", and then happily do whatever system gaming they actually intended to do.
I could go further down this rabbit hole, but this hypothesis has been exhausted. I wish I was this interested in my actual job.