[HN Gopher] Amazon has a book piracy problem
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon has a book piracy problem
Author : tosh
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-07-08 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| codeslave13 wrote:
| Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long
| time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible.
| My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to
| the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba
| as thats where half the crap is from anyway.
| antonymy wrote:
| I'm the same way. I used to say "at least you can rely on books
| bought on Amazon" but now you can't even say that much. Alibris
| or eBay are more reliable online retailers for books nowadays.
| randcraw wrote:
| A better search engine (esp for used books) is BookFinder:
| https://bookfinder.com. Between it and Goodreads, which has
| better ratings anyway, you can avoid Amazon entirely.
| solardev wrote:
| ...and aside from Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon),
| bookfinder is also hosted behind Amazon Cloudfront.
|
| No matter where you go and what you do, Amazon wins, lol.
|
| There's https://www.indiebound.org/ at least, which lets you
| search the inventory of local bookstores.
|
| I've also had good luck ordering used books from
| https://www.thriftbooks.com/ instead of Amazon.
| ProAm wrote:
| Amazon owns Goodreads fyi
| simcop2387 wrote:
| That's not avoiding them entirely, but it does avoid their
| store front for discovery. GoodReads is owned wholly by
| Amazon.
| elcapitan wrote:
| With books, Amazon has become the opposite of a search engine
| for me. I have to use external resources to actually find the
| right titles, to enter them 1:1 into Amazon search to get to
| the books. Context based discovery has become next to
| impossible (which I used it before a lot for). Something must
| have changed in their indexing algorithm a while ago. Also many
| results are flooded with garbage, like some ridiculous
| "notebooks" with similar titles to the searched book or product
| name.
| diamondap wrote:
| Amazon kind of gave up on discovery, at least for books, when
| they realized they could make more money running ads. I sell
| books on Amazon. Years ago, their book pages had two
| carousels of "similar titles" on each book detail page.
| Similar titles were selected by some pretty helpful
| algorithms based on what purchasers of the current title had
| also purchased, as well as some other secret sauce.
|
| At the time, ads weren't very prominent, and they were
| profitable for authors. I could buy them for 5 cents a click
| and even if only one in fifty clicks resulted in a purchase,
| I made money.
|
| Now, most of the algorithmic recommendations are gone, and
| for many ads, Amazon suggests bids of $2.50 or more per
| click. Those clicks bring in money whether Amazon makes a
| sale or not.
|
| To some extent, they've given up on matching customers to the
| best or most suitable products. Why should they work that
| hard if ads are more profitable?
|
| They've also had problems with piracy and counterfeits, as
| mentioned in this article. I heard a radio interview with a
| Target executive a couple years ago where a journalist said,
| "Amazon is underpricing you on everything. How do you plan to
| stay in business?"
|
| She said, "We vet every product on our shelves. We know who
| makes it and where, whether it's legit, and whether it
| contains lead paint and parts kids can choke on. Try to find
| that info on Amazon."
|
| The reporter didn't seem too impressed at the time, but the
| Target woman clearly saw where things were going. As the
| quality, authenticity, and reliability of Amazon's
| merchandise has declined, people are starting to notice.
|
| I'm not sure this is a problem they will ever have the will
| to fix. While they break even or lose money on genuine goods
| they have to ship for free, profits from third party sellers
| and Chinese drop shippers keep the retail operation afloat.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Interesting. The algorithmic recommendations still work
| well for me. I discover a lot of good books swiping the
| carousel.
| iasay wrote:
| I do similar. I use Amazon to find the ISBN number of the book
| I want then search for it on ebay and buy the cheapest second
| hand copy.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Besides, on Ebay you usually get a photograph of the actual
| book or the seller is a known quantity. No such luck with
| Amazon.
| dhc02 wrote:
| You can also go to bookshop.org, buy the book there (usually
| for about the same price as Amazon), and most of the profit
| goes to a local bookstore (which you can choose) instead of a
| big search engine with warehouses.
| V__ wrote:
| Amazon has shown time and time again that they don't care. They
| don't care about fake reviews, counterfeit products, cheap
| Chinese crap, their workforce, or anything really as long as
| customers keep on buying.
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder if they are jumping the shark?
|
| I intensely dislike the paid search results or sponsored
| recommendations. The nonsense-name brands that are either
| chinese or secretly amazon that prevent brand names from
| showing up (and many good brands ship counterfeits). The fake
| reviews. The popup "extended warranty" screens where if you
| close the tab/window... the item doesn't make it to your
| shopping basket.
|
| I remember when I had an iphone, and a few years ago when apple
| did not prevent abuse I just stopped installing apps. The app
| market had jumped the shark and become a cesspool.
|
| Nice apps I liked were bought and monetized in unethical ways,
| and apple didn't care.
|
| For example, I had an app called gas cubby, which let me
| locally - on the phone - keep track of all my vehicles. I could
| enter detailed information about each car such as year, make,
| model, vin, insurance policy, gas purchases, oil changes and
| the like. It would tell you gas mileage and remind you of
| upcoming maintenance.
|
| One day, the app was updated and all my local data was uploaded
| to the cloud!
|
| Another app, camscanner plus purchased by tencent basically did
| the same thing.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I just cancelled prime this year. It has reached a point where I
| just directly shop from AliExpress when required or I buy from
| local stores.
| vannevar wrote:
| This is just one example of a broader problem with Amazon. It has
| become essentially a vehicle for automated salesbots to push
| anonymously manufactured goods of all kinds---not just books---to
| as many buyers as possible, drowning out storefronts for
| identifiable manufacturers and retailers who might have legal
| right via copyright or licensing to sell similar, often higher-
| quality versions.
| eikenberry wrote:
| This is what copyright was actually for... Publishers would put
| out a book, it'd get popular then cut-rate copies would swamp the
| market. Copyright was done to protect the publisher from this
| sort of abuse (and secondarily the author, as the publisher was
| their only means of reaching an audience).
|
| This should be the top (and only IMO) priority of CC enforcement
| instead of going after sci-hub and the like.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| IMO Safaribooksonline is the gold standard of content piracy.
| In the sense of how rampant it is.
| adambatkin wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean by this? The platform formerly
| known as Safari Books is now O'Reilly Learning, and I have
| every reason to believe that it is all above-board, with
| proper licensing from all of the included publishers.
| ptero wrote:
| Originally. But then publishers got greedy ("greed is forever")
| and instead of a relatively short term of protection before
| becoming public domain we now have stupid multi-decade
| restrictions. Those prevent us from printing good out of print
| books and do not give any benefit to either publisher or the
| author.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I'm also a Manning author and this also happened to me a couple
| years ago. Amazon was allowing a counterfeit Kindle edition of
| Classic Computer Science Problems in Python to pose as legitimate
| on my own book's page! Only emailing Jeff got a solution. Manning
| seemed powerless to solve the problem themselves. I still have
| some bad reviews as a result of that counterfeit Kindle edition
| that plague my book page. Totally unfair!
|
| Here's my original Tweet thread about it:
| https://twitter.com/davekopec/status/1302578592552022018
|
| Here's the Hacker News discussion about it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24399301
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I can understand how physical copies of counterfeit books get
| co-mingled with legit inventory, whether they are printed from
| PDF or "re-covered" from destroyed copies ... but how does one
| simply upload a counterfeit Kindle edition at all?
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| One simply uploads it to Amazon. They (Amazon) don't vet it
| and the pirate gets to ride on your coattails. All of this
| pirating would be easy to prevent, but one wonders why they
| even enable this?
| copperx wrote:
| What's Jeff's email? I need to right a few wrongs.
| mkw2000 wrote:
| I recently purchased a book that I was really looking forward to
| from Amazon and received a counterfeit version with the correct
| cover but complete nonsense inside. It wasn't the book I
| purchased at all just a scam. It was super frustrating and I
| returned it and will not be purchasing books from Amazon ever
| again, but I wonder what was even the purpose of the scam? Isn't
| everyone just going to get annoyed and return it? What would the
| seller even get out of this?
| iasay wrote:
| If they got rid of marketplace sellers and actually got control
| over their supply chain then they might actually go up in
| people's opinion.
|
| However Amazon and AWS isn't about doing a good job, it's about
| doing a mediocre job and making everyone happy though apologies.
|
| And that's why I'm still using them. They are a good balance.
| themitigating wrote:
| What does aws have to do with this article, piracy, or the
| retail side of Amazon
| iasay wrote:
| The same soulless automation running the show.
| hourago wrote:
| That is going to be the fight of the next generation.
| Inappropriate videos on YouTube for kids, extremist
| propaganda in Facebook or fake products in Amazon all have
| that soulless automation as main culprit. (Let's not talk
| about Roblox)
|
| Cost goes against resilience and quality. You can automate
| things to a limit until everything breaks down.
| themitigating wrote:
| Whom?
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Not sure why enabling piracy is a good balance. Care to expound
| on that?
| copperx wrote:
| Oh, so that's why they don't have balance caps in AWS? It's
| true that apologies are a good balance.
| duped wrote:
| I'm surprised there aren't class action lawsuits targeting the
| FAANGs for this kind of thing
| ProAm wrote:
| They are just a marketplace, they cannot control or police what
| is sold there. /s
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Author of the article posting in the tweet.
|
| Happy to answer any questions. (Or discuss technical book
| authoring in general).
| not2b wrote:
| Can't the ripped off authors and publishers sue Amazon for big
| money for this? Or maybe band together and bring a class action
| suit?
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Perhaps. Someone who responded to my original tweet opined that
| Amazon and Google could kill the pirate market easily. It
| doesn't appear to be something that either wants to do.
| Mixtape wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but I've recently heard from some corners of
| the collecting world that this is a major issue for video game
| resellers on Amazon (and other platforms) as well. People
| regularly receive flash carts with stuck-on labels (i.e. stolen
| trademarks) on them and a pirated ROM running on counterfeited
| hardware. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible in some cases to
| identify a well-crafted fake from a genuine copy before purchase,
| and the burden is thus placed on Amazon to take action against
| sellers of the products. Given that the loss of one consumer in a
| relatively niche yet very competitive market will not deal
| significant damage to Amazon's overall profits, (and that Amazon
| can feasibly shift blame towards the seller,) the issue persists.
|
| All of this is to say that the idea of pirated books
| proliferating on Amazon is entirely feasible if electronic
| devices can be so successfully faked. However, what's not lost on
| me is the irony of Amazon, a marketplace whose initial success
| was anchored by trust in its ability to deliver books, falling
| victim to such schemes in this specific market space.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Nowadays I do what Francois recommends in his tweet. Go to our
| local bookstore and order from there. The extent to which Amazon
| enables this kind of behavior and presumably also profits from it
| and the extent to which they ignore the problem altogether
| shouldn't be supported.
|
| Speaks to a larger problem as well, the excuses platforms make to
| not do due diligence when it comes to what is being sold and the
| lack of ability to talk to a real person on the other end
| quickly.
| dhc02 wrote:
| You can also choose your favorite local bookstore on
| bookshop.org and order from there.
| beej71 wrote:
| Amazon makes money from every pirated book sold. Maybe book
| publishers lack the clout of the music publishers?
| dogsboywonder wrote:
| I like how that article's thumbnail was generated by DALL-E lol.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-08 23:00 UTC)