“Worthless” books priced at up to thousands, of dollars on Amazon.com and which contain only nonsensical text have been identified as possible vehicles for money laundering by an author whose name was, he says, used to send almost $24,000 (£17,200) to an unknown and fraudulent seller.

Amazon’s self-publishing arm CreateSpace makes it relatively straightforward to publish a title that contains any text, provided that this isn’t “placeholder” or dummy text, and allowing fake books to be sold on the Amazon website at a price chosen by the seller.

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Book clinic: do editors often have to cut authors down to size?

 Maxwell Perkins, editor, at Scribner’s, of F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas…