31–40 of 517 posts
I'm confused why these "how to game Amazon e-books" e-books chose to impersonate a real person at all, and particularly someone very likely to notice and complain. This feels very on-the-nose.
Who on earth would buy a book written by ChatGPT from Amazon? Unless they thought they weren't.
I went looking for childrens books. Some titles looked good. But if you view the preview .... complete trash. Must cost nothing to upload, and you might get some suckers that don't realize.
The modern structure pioneered by Amazon removes all that. The actual cost for a seller to make a listing is apparently half a cent per month. After the first 100,000 listings, that is, and only on SKUs without a sale in the last year.
>I did file a report with Amazon, complaining that these books were using my name and reputation without my consent. Amazon’s response: “Please provide us with any trademark registration numbers that relate to your claim.” When I replied that I did not have a trademark for my name, they closed the case and said the books would not be removed from sale. I see you had a typical customer service experience with Amazon.…
It's not trademark, but you can sue someone for fraudulently using your name and likeness, it varies by state in the US. Of course the actual entity posting the fraudulent books are probably overseas somewhere and will disappear if anyone tries to contact them. Maybe if it happens to enough people a class-action lawsuit against Amazon would force them to do some due diligence when listing a book to make sure that the…
Can you actually make real money at this? As it seems trivial to generate tons of books on niche topics if it is.
This seems like textbook unauthorized commercial use of likeness, where both the "author" and (now that they've been informed and refused to act - and their business processes don't even appear to allow them to recognize unauthorized commercial use of likeness) Amazon are involved.
Next step should be your lawyer sending Amazon legal department a polite "stop fucking doing that right now and take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again now that I've brought this to your attention" piece of snailmail.
I'd suggest authors pile together with other authors in their state/country to hire a PR person or lawyer to draft letters specific to their region.
For extra giggles, have everyone send their demand letters to arrive in the same few days.
Here's a protip, folks:
Customer service reps are paid a fraction of what corporate lawyers are, are shielded by phone systems designed to make you waste your time / go away, and they have no obligation to respond or follow up to you. They're literally a "go away" droid army for the corporation.
Chances are the corporate legal folks are paid at least as much as you are, likely a lot more. And when you send them something, someone pretty much has* to read it. And if the letter ends with something along the lines of "I'd like to try to work this out without resorting to legal action", they've got to send at least some sort of response. Otherwise, you can file suit and say "gee judge, we tried to resolve this but they wouldn't even answer us"...and now they're already on the wrong foot with the judge for ignoring you, because judges really want people to at least attempt to work shit out before coming to court.
If you make an honest effort trying to resolve something (documenting all the way), stop wasting your time and hire a lawyer, or send the letter yourself. You merely need to be polite, state the problem and how you were harmed/damaged, and say something about desiring to resolve things without legal action.
* to head something off at the pass: yeah, it's probably a legal assistant or paralegal, not full blown counsel, at least in the early stages; still paid a lot more than a phone support droid. Also, the corporate lawyers might be an outside firm, and said firm might be getting paid a fixed contract price. You might not be running up the bill for BigCo, but every bit of BigFirmCo's time that you use, that's less profit for them, and increases the chances BigCo's contract goes up next year, or they get dropped as a client.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Out of curiosity, how do intellectual property laws handle someone publishing a work under someone else's name? Is that a trademark violation? I assume in the same way they handle somebody else who actually has the same name publishing books... they do nothing. Unless perhaps they are associating themselves with you "By the author of Such and Such "
If you "Look Inside" the offending books on Amazon you can see they have extensive "About the Author" page describing Jane Friedman - so it would be difficult to argue that the books are not trying to trick people into believing it's Jane.
Can you actually make real money at this? As it seems trivial to generate tons of books on niche topics if it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might as well go to aliexpress and buy from the original source for a 50% discount.
True, but then you gotta wait until next month instead of next day. Amazon's delivery network is the biggest thing they have going for them.
"who cares what we deliver as long as it gets there quickly"
not quite as snappy as "Customer Obsession", but more honest
Instead of "working" with Amazon to get one of these books removed (sounds super fun), here's a solution I could help an author implement: attach an NFT to each "official" book sold. Either at payment (for digital copies; might require marketplace buy-in) and/or via an NFC in the book binding. Use the token/NFC as a means of authentication, and a way connect with the author, other fans, etc.