Is a book by another spine still a book?
Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
41–50 of 172 posts
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#42Amazon has little incentive to stop selling counterfeit goods. It is simply not reasonable to believe that they are not capable of accurately preventing counterfeit goods from surviving in their site. Remember, this is the same company run by the brilliant micromanaging CEO. Everything that happens within Amazon is known to him. If an individual setup their own website and sold counterfeit goods, the feds would come…
It's only their job to attempt to prevent listing and supporting counterfeit products. Every individual is responsible for themselves to not break the law and sell a fake product.
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Careful with those fake chargers. They're known to catch fire.
And shock you or destroy your equipment. A lot of what makes real (UL/ETL listed) chargers expensive is making sure that line voltage stays adequately separated from the low voltage side.
I would add "In a small space" Making an larger power supply that keeps the high and low sides adequately separated is pretty easy and cheap as long as you stick to genuine components.
But that then leads onto the whole fake component issue. For example the component will be a optocoupler but the dirt cheap knock off supply may not be using the same level of quality or a knock off component as those found in genuine power supplies which _could_ create a High to Low voltage path if that part failed.
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#44How isnt Amazon liable for this / sued? If Walmart did the same there would be various lawsuits
Don't be ridiculous. It's better for technical books to be freely available for everyone to read. Think about it, it is more optimal for the world in the long run.
For free digital content I have some sympathy with that point of view, but the counterfeit book featured in the article was a paper copy on sale for $48, along with a kindle version for $36.
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#45I ordered a copy of Deep Learning [1] from Amazon last week. On Barnes & Noble [2] the book costs $76.80. On Amazon it is just $28.00. I received the book a couple of days ago. The pages look like it was printed using a low-resolution printer, and the ink color is uneven across pages. I am returning the book. Possible counterfeit, sold by a third party seller. On the other hand this book is also available free online [3]. Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Ma...
[2] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deep-learning-ian-goodfello...
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#46The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, siftin…
I've noticed that it's all come full-circle for me again too, when it comes to purchasing from Amazon. It seems that I can't even trust the "verified purchase" reviews anymore.
The practice of shipping empty boxes to shill reviewers is fairly widespread
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-files-first-ever-suit-o...
"According to the suit, the site operated by Gentile offers to provide fake “verified reviews” for a premium, telling the sellers that they can ship empty boxes to reviewers involved in the scheme, to trick Amazon into thinking that the product had actually been purchased."
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#47Totally, this. As a case in point, my "Digital Image Processing and Analysis: Human and Computer Vision Applications with CVIPtools, Second Edition" text book stated right on the cover that the book was "Not for sale in the US" (or something to that effect). Seemed odd, then I read the intro in which the author was excited that he finally convinced the publisher to print in color. My book was not in color (super grea…
abebooks (part of amazon) sells a lot of international editions. https://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editi... It makes sense to sell the same book at lower prices in parts of the world where the regular price is unaffordable. Importing those books back to the US is not what publishers want, but I think isn't illegal.
Yes. It's typically legal as decided by the US Supreme Court in 2013 Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons.
(6-3 decision with a rather atypical split.)
Added: Basically the decision affirmed that first sale doctrine applied.
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#48Surely this should be an easy fix for them to be able to detect counterfeit books being created? If they are anything like other on demand self publishing platforms, you upload a pdf or similar file to create the book, and surely it's not beyond the wit of those at amazon to create an ml based system that would be able to detect similar files to those of legitimate books that they already carry and flag them to the l…
It is not that easy. They need a reliable system to do that. For what can go wrong, see all the hate Youtube's ContentID gets. But, identifying whole books should be simple enough.
If the official book is available on Kindle, then it actually should be quite simple for them to use a locality-sensitive hash to find plagiarized uploads.
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#49Surely this should be an easy fix for them to be able to detect counterfeit books being created? If they are anything like other on demand self publishing platforms, you upload a pdf or similar file to create the book, and surely it's not beyond the wit of those at amazon to create an ml based system that would be able to detect similar files to those of legitimate books that they already carry and flag them to the l…
For books on Kindle, Amazon at least used to do some degree of checking. I published a book five or six years ago that was based in part on blog posts that I had previously published in a number of different places. They flagged my book and I had to send them a number of links demonstrating that I was the original author.
Re: Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
#50The counterfeit and review manipulation issues have rendered Amazon unpleasant enough for me that buying local is something I've started to enjoy again. I trust the merchant to have performed some kind of vetting for merchandise sold on premise, and the price is often good or (interestingly enough) even better than on Amazon. Often enough local is still more expensive, but it beats browsing Amazon for an hour, siftin…
The third party seller stuff has really killed my faith in Amazon. If I wanted to have to read reviews for the entity selling the good and have some expectation of getting a counterfeit/broken good, I would go to eBay. I used to go to Amazon because I could trust them, but that trust is lonnng gone. These days I'm shopping more and more locally, because I can actually see the thing I'm buying.
Side note: I'm sad to see NewEgg headed in this same eBay-clone direction.