Amazon has a book piracy problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#91

Post by nirvdrum » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 3:22 AM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #51

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.

I have thousands of orders on Amazon and have never received something different than what I expected. Have I received items that were crap? Sure, because I chose to go with the noname item from the random seller for cost reasons. If it’s unusable I just return it. That said, I don’t think I have even a 1% return rate. Buy items with a few reviews and read the top reviews instead of only trusting the star system and…

It's more involved than that. You can buy a brand name product shipped and sold by Amazon.com and still end up with a counterfeit item because Amazon mixes inventory with third party sellers.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#92

Post by ta988 » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 3:36 AM UTC

Amazon has a problem of over-optimization. They treated everything as tiny optimizable problems, including hiring. Now they hire only people that optimized themselves to pass the interviews, who then optimize to climb the ranks but don't bring that much to the behemoth. And it is the same for many of their products, optimized for artificial markers and slowly becoming irrelevant. The search engine of the store is a perfect illustration of that. And the sellers on the platform as well.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#93

Post by egypturnash » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 3:38 AM UTC

fernly wrote: post #62

This is crazy when you think that if you upload a YT video with 10 seconds of a Beatles song in it, the YT copyright engine will be on you in minutes, "demonetizing" your vid. YT can spot copyrighted audio and punish it automatically, while Amazon can't recognize a whole book including covers as a violation.

I guess the RIAA has a lot more power to get noticed than booksellers…

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#94

Post by plaguepilled » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 3:45 AM UTC

ptero wrote: post #25

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.

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.

I agree with this. It would be nice to have a reduced grace period for books before they're public domain - something like 40 years seems reasonable to me.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#95

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 3:51 AM UTC

dhosek wrote: post #84

tzs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 printe…

Dickens is a pretty big outlier in sales longevity. The percentage of books that are still selling copies 100 years after they're published rounds to 0%.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#96

Post by kupopuffs » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 4:01 AM UTC

fernly wrote: post #62

This is crazy when you think that if you upload a YT video with 10 seconds of a Beatles song in it, the YT copyright engine will be on you in minutes, "demonetizing" your vid. YT can spot copyrighted audio and punish it automatically, while Amazon can't recognize a whole book including covers as a violation.

If only books made more money ohoho

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#97

Post by zrobotics » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 4:03 AM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #69

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'…

This is somewhat of an aside about Target, but I've noticed that their inventory has moved significantly upmarket in the last 10 years or so. Their long-term strategy appears to be distinguishing themselves from the "bottom-of-the-barrel low-cost stuff" market and settling in a "low-cost but still decent stuff" niche.

Thing is, even Walmart vets their inventory. This problem has been going on long enough that I've been telling friends & family not to purchase anything that goes on or in your body from Amazon due to counterfeit issues. Whereas, with Walmart I am pretty well assured that if I buy a can of green giant corn it's actually produced by that company.

Sure, it's definitely possible for counterfeits to sneak into their supply chain, but that is only possible via employees or suppliers defrauding Walmart. Walmart also loses on this, so they are incentivised to audit and prevent this, since they actually hold and own the inventory. Whereas Amazon has zero incentive (or ability) to audit their supply chain, since the inventory they hold is actually owned by someone else. [aside-yes, I know that frito lay, nestle, etc actually own their inventory in Walmart and just merchandise the space]. Target definitely has moved upmarket, but even their low cost competitor has far tighter controls than Amazon.

I would even speculate that Walmart has less likelihood of counterfeits in the supply chain than target, having been tangentially involved with a vendor getting into each retailer. Walmart is incredibly mercenary with their suppliers, and due to their size they can get away with very onerous terms. I tend to dislike them for this, but I will admit I'm impressed with their supply chain management and they certainly don't leave opportunities for fraud available to their suppliers.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#98

Post by crooked-v » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

diamondap wrote: post #21

elcapitan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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'…

On a similar note, all my general-purpose electrical stuff (power strips, cables, etc) comes from brick and mortar stores now, because I just can't trust that the same items from Amazon, or even from Wal-mart's awful online 'marketplace', won't burn my house down.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#99

Post by jfim » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #98

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'…

On a similar note, all my general-purpose electrical stuff (power strips, cables, etc) comes from brick and mortar stores now, because I just can't trust that the same items from Amazon, or even from Wal-mart's awful online 'marketplace', won't burn my house down.

If you want to avoid the Walmart marketplace, you can filter by retailer and select Walmart, this gets rid of third party sellers.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#100

Post by zrobotics » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 4:18 AM UTC

DrudgeCorporate wrote: post #79

elcapitan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And then once you find the book and get it shipped to you it gets destroyed in shipping because they put it in a padded envelope or a box with zero padding. Every book that I've ordered from them has been damaged. I quit ordering books once it happened the fourth time.

Aside, but I truly don't understand how Amazon can get away with how poorly they pack product. I work on the IT management side of fulfillment, and have been involved with shipping vendor negotiations as well as auditing our return/damage/shipping claims. Amazon routinely ships product in comically oversized boxes which increases the likelihood of damage to the point it is a meme.

Having worked on it, I get that sizing packaging is a tremendously complex optimization problem that even other experienced programmers underestimate the complexity. The options for different package size grow factorially with different product selections, and it isn't possible to have every size box available in a packing station. However, it isn't an unsolvable problem to pack better. Optimizing split shipments to increase effeciency is tremendously complex, but calculating the box size needed for an order is actually pretty trivial (ignoring packing density, which is oddly often a reasonable assumption for shipping goods to the consumer). Amazon can certainly improve here, just by using routing packages to a packing station with a closer box size and having differing box sizes in each station.

I have always assumed that, given their scale, Amazon doesn't necessarily face the same price hit that a normal shopper faces when sending an oversize package. I have gotten multiple shipments from Amazon that were so oversize that, at my company's shipping pricing, would likely result in a net loss due to shipping cost. However, I suspect that Amazon has negotiated rates that insulate them from this, and the shipping companies take a loss on individual packages to gain the volume.