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Amazon has a book piracy problem

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Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#81

Post by __mharrison__ »

yalogin wrote: post #80

Does Amazon have an incentive to fix this? This is the equivalent of Facebook or Twitter removing all bots. In this case they are much more directly seeing revenue. The only people losing are the authors and manufacturers of the original product. I see consumers don’t care and in fact actively buy the lower priced item and are happy about it. If they were to fix it, they need a huge operation to create a system to id…

For books, especially self-published books, this is not a hard problem.

Google and Amazon could solve this sort of piracy in a week of they wanted to...

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#82

Post by dhosek »

randcraw wrote: post #16
codeslave13 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

I’ve been using bookfinder since it was mxbf.com There have been some long out of print hard to find books that I was able to find thanks to them (although in one case early in the site’s lifetime, I found a book I’d been searching for for over a decade and placed an order only to have the bookseller discover that they apparently had either sold the book, lost it or had it stolen). It’s my go-to for used books.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#83

Post by brownbat »

codeslave13 wrote: post #2

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.

Counterfeit DVD box sets are pretty rampant. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zwa9uKIYhM

I remember getting obviously burned DVDs run through terrible label makers back in the day. Now they're copying all the the art and packaging for box sets.

I'm both impressed at the work they put in, and also confused why they occasionally leave obvious errors like typos on the box after all that work.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#84

Post by dhosek »

tzs wrote: post #59
eikenberry wrote: post #11

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.

> 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). Stephen Breyer, the recently retired Supreme Court Justice, wrote an interesting article in 1970 back when he was a law professor about that, called "The Uneasy C…

That doesn’t sound right. There was a thriving trade in unauthorized editions of American books in England and English books in America in the nineteenth century, since there was no mutually recognized copyright between the two countries and there was money to be made selling, e.g., Dickens’s novels in the U.S., especially if there wasn’t any need to pay the author. The ability to make photographic plates from printed material (a technology developed in the second half of the nineteenth century) also reduced the cost of typesetting.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#85

Post by __mharrison__ »

warkdarrior wrote: post #76
__mharrison__ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why enabling piracy is a good balance. Care to expound on that?

Information just wants to be free, even if you call it "piracy."

I assume that you are a programmer and from your response you write only open source code ... for free.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#86

Post by AlexandrB »

Amazon absolutely sucks for buying books. It's not just the counterfeits, but the way they now ship books in flimsy paper envelopes. The last book I ordered from Amazon (because it was not available at other retailers) was left on my porch, in a paper envelope, during a rainstorm. Book obviously got wet and now has that distinct "wavy" look.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#87

Post by dhosek »

beej71 wrote: post #6

Amazon makes money from every pirated book sold. Maybe book publishers lack the clout of the music publishers?

That seems likely. Book publishers are also less exploitative than record companies. If you look at the copyright notice in a book, with rare exceptions it will be Copyright 2022 by A. U. Thor, while on music it will be Copyright 2022 by Exploitive Records, Inc.

Then there’s finances. When a publisher pays you an advance on royalties, if your book never sells enough to earn those royalties, you will not have to pay back the advance (although, for a two-book deal, it might reduce the effective amount of money you get on the second book, depending on how the contract is written, which is why a good agent is necessary). The publisher shoulders all the production, editing, distribution and publicity costs. With a recording contract, all the costs of recording are deducted from the artist’s royalties and many bands have had a hit record where they ended up owing the record company money. And for all of that, as noted above, the record company claims ownership of the recording that the band paid for.

TV/movie production ends up being somewhere between the two. Not as exploitative as the record companies, not as genteel as the publishers.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#88

Post by AlexandrB »

nikanj wrote: post #47
m463 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

My general feeling is that commerce has jumped the shark. You can make so much more money with scamming, the honest businesses are few and far apart. And nigh impossible to identify. It doesn't feel like a platform problem, more of a societal fabric unraveling.

If there's no enforcement of anti-fraud laws or consumer protections, why not scam people? As you said, it's more profitable than legitimate business. We live in the golden age of fraud.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#89

Post by FireBeyond »

iends wrote: post #78
diamondap wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Amazon used to have a great recommendation page that had a tab for new releases and coming soon. This was incredible for book discovery and they got so much money from me with these pages. Amazon is currently recommending me shower heads and bathroom hardware from when I remodeled a month ago because I bought that stuff then. Pointless.

Yup. Buy a printer and you'll see recommendations after you purchase one for every other printer in existence, rather than say, ink, toner for the one you did.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#90

Post by newman8r »

codeslave13 wrote: post #2

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.

And if you want fresh product for any reason, ordering directly from the company is the best way to ensure that.
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