I'm genuinely curious - can someone explain how Amazon has avoided litigation on this for so long?
If you're wondering about some weird social ill plaguing society from the tech industry, 99% of the time the root cause of it is Section 230.
In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#22Could it just be that bootleg operations are scanning in the books with cameras rigs, and then using tesseract or some similar OCR to parse the text back out and then running it through Microsoft Word spell check to manually resolve conversion errors?
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#23I buy most of my books on ebay from the seller "thrift.books", and some other goodwill ebay/physical stores. They're used, and generally around $3.00/free shipping. Some Goodwill stores have every book priced at $1.00, and have nearly everything you'd want. I'd never buy a new book again, especially from Amazon.
Agreed, thrift.books seems to be the most reliable way to get a nice physical copy of an older book.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what is the "main text" and who has the definitive copy? At first glance, most people would think of chapter text and headings but even that can vary from edition to edition and printing to printing and country to country and translation to translation. How are typos/corrections handled and who has the right to make them? Then we need the schema/structure for the content. And that schema has to preserve whitespac…
Ok - your points are all valid, but they are also huge. So if we try and address them we will get nowhere for a long time. What would the MVP of this be? What if we had a register of signed checksums with reputation and community selection (I trust these folks, but not these folks, verified artist wins)?
Imo this is just good old fashioned quality control. When you can't trust your wholesaler you randomly sample the shipment and test it, rejecting the whole shipment (or exact penalties) for product outside an acceptable threshold.
The publisher could supply a manuscript. It could be compared against the manuscript database (note: not with a checksum), and if it's too similar to other copyrighted works then it should flagged for manual review, and rejected if identical. That way you leave the door open for new translations/editions from different publishers, which should be treated as separate products.
Then when the shipment of physical books arrive, you sample them via OCR + text differences and if it's outside your standards, reject it.
But like the article mentions, that's expensive.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#25Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are sellin…
I will be adding books to the list now too, but the number of categories I won’t shop for on Amazon has ballooned in just the past couple of years. It’s amazing to browse the reviews of brand-name products ranging from kitchen gadgets to yard tools, to even board games, and see customers saying things like “much cheaper plastic than the one I bought at Target” or “huge downgrade in card printing and game piece quality.” It’s not impossible that some of these might legitimately be massive cost-cutting measures by the OEMs, but I have to think most are the result of Amazon’s rampant counterfeiting problem.
In fact, I don’t think I really even have a product category blacklist anymore; it’s more of a whitelist. The only thing I will buy at Amazon are products that should be impossible to fake (beyond the industrial design), like an iOS device.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#26Perhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for important texts? Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings, forewards, etc.
But what is the "main text" and who has the definitive copy? At first glance, most people would think of chapter text and headings but even that can vary from edition to edition and printing to printing and country to country and translation to translation. How are typos/corrections handled and who has the right to make them? Then we need the schema/structure for the content. And that schema has to preserve whitespac…
Interestingly I feel like leaning on some work in the field of genomics where comparing different formats, each of which contain potential 'errors' is something done.
Search engines also seem to do something like this already as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinHash. MinHashing is also used in genomics. White space, if handled appropriately are just more characters.
But most literature won't be available via flat text files I imagine. Some sort of image -> text converter would be needed, which I bet exists, but may require tweaking to allow more fine grained representation of white spaces.
Authors publishing new texts could release some kind of checksum to go with it ... or to venture into waters that I don't know much about ... could blockchain be used in some way to keep a record of edits to text?
I'm sure someone out there has put a lot of thought into guaranteeing the authenticity of a text.
Edit to add: This is interesting to think about in terms of all media. Wasn't it just last week that there was a headline about Boris Johnson editing some of his old videos? How do you guarantee that the information that you viewed a year ago is the same today as a year ago?
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#27Perhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for important texts? Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings, forewards, etc.
Or a signing certificate by a CA?
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#28Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are sellin…
I will be adding books to the list now too, but the number of categories I won’t shop for on Amazon has ballooned in just the past couple of years. It’s amazing to browse the reviews of brand-name products ranging from kitchen gadgets to yard tools, to even board games, and see customers saying things like “much cheaper plastic than the one I bought at Target” or “huge downgrade in card printing and game piece qualit…
It's definitely more work to buy authentic products than it used to be. These days I find myself aborting purchases at the checkout phase, when I can review the actual shipper of the product. If it's "fulfilled by Amazon" or a shipper I already trust, then I consider it good to go, but otherwise, I back out and start over with the same product and a different product link. Now with Amazon fulfilling for other shippers it's going to be really hard unless Amazon can do the heavy lifting to ensure product authenticity on the way in to their warehouses. If they don't, I guess it'll be time to give up on Amazon entirely.
This book scanning junk is definitely a next level problem. Wow.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#29I'm genuinely curious - can someone explain how Amazon has avoided litigation on this for so long?
If you're wondering about some weird social ill plaguing society from the tech industry, 99% of the time the root cause of it is Section 230.
Section 230 of what code / title?
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're wondering about some weird social ill plaguing society from the tech industry, 99% of the time the root cause of it is Section 230.
Section 230 of what code / title? https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/ECFR?page=browse
Of the Communications Decency Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sec...