Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#41

Post by Spooky23 »

paxys wrote: post #21
memmcgee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Amazon the marketplace was solely responsible for the upkeep of the marketplace, they'd be more inclined to actually maintain it in a working manner. Not to mention it'd be easier for publishers to sue them to compel compliance.

> If Amazon the marketplace was solely responsible for the upkeep of the marketplace Who else is responsible for the upkeep of the marketplace? The "break them up" argument works if there is an inherent conflict of interest that would get resolved if they were separate entities, but that isn't true in this case.

FBA was borderline fraud from the beginning — it was a scheme to evade sales tax.

The inherent conflicts of interest are everywhere. It commingles inventory, competes with its partners and encourages an auction like atmosphere for constrained product. Retail Amazon and marketplace Amazon need to be segmented for consumers to understand who and how they are buying products.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#42

Post by nitrogen »

akeck wrote: post #12
memmcgee wrote: post #5

Amazing how a site that started by selling books now does an awful job doing just that. Another reason Amazon et al should be broken up.

I'd be fine with them simply being made directly liable for all piracy and counterfeiting on any of their platforms.

Especially annoying is seeing paperbacks listed for a book that only exists in hardcover

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#43

Post by boomboomsubban »

lonelappde wrote: post #30
thaumasiotes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a way of believing that the law -- whatever it might be -- makes terrible ideas into good ideas. From the bottom of https://www.kansas.com/news/state/article234237337.html : > Last year, a Chinese national who was a research professor at Kansas State University was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for stealing valuable American rice seeds — a trade secret — that can be used to treat ga…

Paying people for their work incentivizes them to do work. You can read about in the US Constitution.

The US Constitution explicitly allows slavery...

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#44

Post by deathanatos »

lonelappde wrote: post #30
thaumasiotes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a way of believing that the law -- whatever it might be -- makes terrible ideas into good ideas. From the bottom of https://www.kansas.com/news/state/article234237337.html : > Last year, a Chinese national who was a research professor at Kansas State University was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for stealing valuable American rice seeds — a trade secret — that can be used to treat ga…

Paying people for their work incentivizes them to do work. You can read about in the US Constitution.

> Paying people for their work

This whole thread started with

> He's dead.

The point being that they're not getting paid for their work. Perhaps their descendants are, or far more likely these days, their employer.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#45

Post by ben_w »

TylerE wrote: post #37
kuzehanka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the scandalous bits?

Sex (especially homosexulatity), drug use were major things

Those parts were definitely not in any version I read, so I should consider finding a modern translation myself.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#46

Post by moksly »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #14

Conflating reviews of different editions is the straw that makes it impossible for the shopper. I was looking to buy a translation of 1001 Arabian Nights. Some reviews warned of scams, some spoke positively of the quality of the translation, but they were the same reviews on every translation and every edition. I gave up. That much seems like a simple change too... simpler than conflating them. The only explanation I…

A few months back I was looking for an introductory book for a course I am going to teach. I picked up 10 books based on their reviews on various sites, but they were all terrible. Basically they were $15-40 poorly written versions of what you could get for free in the official tutorial and documentation. In the end I ended up looking up authors I knew from previous books to see if they had one covering the content, one of them did. It had mediocre reviews, and deservedly so because the editing isn’t great and there are flaws I needed to correct for my courses, but it was still miles ahead of any of the 4.5-5 star reviewed books.

This is very anecdotal of course, but it did get me wondering. I have never written a customer review myself, but I always put that down to being busy/lazy and never saw myself as representative for that. But I asked around among my peers, people I would have wanted to read a review from, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one who’s never written a positive review. A lot of them, it turned out, write negative reviews for poor services quite frequently, but almost no positive reviews had ever been written.

All completely anecdotal, but it seems to correlate with what other people on HN have experienced. Maybe we shouldn’t have outsourced book reviews to the anonymous population of the internet?

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#47

Post by Dylan16807 »

deathanatos wrote: post #44
lonelappde wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying people for their work incentivizes them to do work. You can read about in the US Constitution.

> Paying people for their work This whole thread started with > He's dead. The point being that they're not getting paid for their work. Perhaps their descendants are, or far more likely these days, their employer.

That's because we're talking about two different cases.

Copying without paying a >50 year old book: no real negative consequences

Copying without paying a seed that was developed in the last few years: significant negative consequences

(Obviously there are significant positive consequences to pirating that rice. But limited-term IP strikes a reasonable balance between getting more done and also releasing it to the public.)

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#48

Post by todd8 »

TylerE wrote: post #22
not_a_cop75 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the good news is with 1001 Arabian Nights is you don't have to buy it. Project Gutenberg has at least one good version.

This is a complicated issue. Modern translations (written in the last 30 years, say) are way way better than the public domain editions, not least because they don't have puritanical Victorians editing out all the "scandalous" bits.

See, for example, the troubles the noted explorer and translator Sir Richard Burton had. His translations of the Kama Sutra and 1001 Arabian Nights were considered scandalous in Victorian England.

He was an undaunted explorer and traveled widely and spoke 29 languages. He wrote extensively, but sadly his widow considered some of his papers too explicit to be published after his death and instead destroyed them.

His search for the headwaters of the Nile are the basis for the film Mountains of the Moon . See [1].

[1] Historical Badass: Explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#49

Post by klez »

vaer-k wrote: post #6

"On Sunday, Amazon said in a statement that “there is no single source of truth” [...]"

I see what you did, but taking that quote out of context is a bit ironic, given some of the points made in the article.

Which may be why you did it, to be fair. Is it?

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#50

Post by johnr2 »

nitrogen wrote: post #42
akeck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be fine with them simply being made directly liable for all piracy and counterfeiting on any of their platforms.

Especially annoying is seeing paperbacks listed for a book that only exists in hardcover

> Especially annoying is seeing paperbacks listed for a book that only exists in hardcover

Not quite as annoying as ordering a book listed as a hardcover and receiving a cheap photocopied paperback. (Has happened several times here).

Post reply on HN