Beware of E-Book Scams

by Cathy Winsby
(Nanaimo, BC)

This morning while enjoying my morning cup of coffee and surfing the net I came across an e-book with the title "Soap Making Essentials".

As you might imagine, this caught my attention. After all, it is the name of my website!

I was a bit curious (just a little!) so I bought the book...and was mighty surprised to discover that the entire chapter 3 and most of chapter 4 was stolen from this site.

Oh sure they changed things up a little by mixing up the name of the recipes, reordering the list of ingredients and butchering my instructions but they are the same recipes.

In the e-book, my Avocado Oil Soap recipe is called Avocado Infused with Essential Oils and my Starter Vegetable Oil Soap recipe is called Vegetable Oil Soap for Starters. It goes on and on.

The person also decided to take a little creative license here and there, swapping out one ingredient for another...without recalculating the recipe for the lye needed. Dangerous!

And then topped it all off with referring to lye as Hydrogen Peroxide rather than Sodium Hydroxide! Yikes! I really hope no one buys the book and tries to make soap.

It got me curious and I started to go all Sherlock Holmes. Found that the authors name is that of a romance novelist...hmmm...sound fishy to you? Did to me. Why would a romance novelist toss out a crappy half baked plagiarized soap making e-book? They wouldn't.

Did a bit more searching and found another e-book with the name 'Soap Making Essentials' as part of the title. Huh! And this author writes history books. Apparently he spends his spare time copying and pasting soapy e-book knock-off's as well. Somehow I doubt it.

These lovely e-books are available on Chapters Indigo, Kobo and Amazon. Yippie!

I spent this evening trying to contact Amazon and Kobo which of course was a riot. While the customer service people were really trying to help me, there was a little bit of a language gap which sent my blood pressure up a bit higher than it already was. Hopefully I will be successful in having the books pulled from their inventory.

Long and short of it? Be very careful when purchasing e-books even from places you thought would have reputable merchandise. Make sure the author is someone you know to be knowledgeable in the subject you're buying the e-book for.

So if you too stumble across an e-book with the title 'Soap Making Essentials' and the authors name isn't Cathy Winsby...I didn't write it!

Happy soaping out there!

Cathy Winsby