It's all business.
Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
71–80 of 152 posts
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#72Stick to checking out books from your library / Libby. You'll save money and might end up making discoveries you otherwise wouldn't.
In doing my research on current books, I checked out a few from the library that were really good and definitely HN-worthy:
Bill and Dave (Michael Malone). The history of Hewlett-Packard.
Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes (Travis Baldree)
Hitch-22 (Christopher Hitchens). his memoir
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#73The biggest issue is how Amazon fails to police its genre categorisations. The advice from the guys making garbage books, which they quite obviously put into practice, is to apply for genres with low book counts to more easily get a best seller badge for that category. Which makes Amazon a war to get miscategorised.
I'd argue an even bigger issue is the way Amazon clogs up its search and product listings with sponsored results. Amazon isn't interested in selling you what you are looking for. They want you to buy some sponsored junk instead. This mindset permeates the site and IMO is the source of many current problems.
This is my biggest complaint. I look for CS and history books and get ads for romances. At least I figured that out. It turns out romance books make more money than any other category. Apparently, Amazon's ad inventory is mostly romance.
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#74The focus of the article is on charlatans selling courses, but I think Amazon deserves more scrutiny. They enable this entire ecosystem of fake books and fake products. I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.
> they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes they are not incentivized to do so, since they profit from the fakes; only if/when this results in customers disengaging from Amazon altogether and total sales decreasing, will it be seen as a problem
MBAs will never understand intrinsically that $1 in extra profit from a ripped-off customer is dangerous profit if that churn it increases your future CAC by more than >$1
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#75Stick to checking out books from your library / Libby. You'll save money and might end up making discoveries you otherwise wouldn't.
In principle yes, but it is often far less than ideal. Popular books often have only 2 copies, physical or digital, so you need to wait in the queue for a while before you can get to read it. And that's only if your library carries the book, physical or digital -- there is often a long delay before you can find book in a bookstore and you can find it on the shelve. For various reasons the library might not want to pu…
> Popular books often have only 2 copies, physical or digital, so you need to wait in the queue for a while before you can get to read it.
Wait in the queue? What's fundamentally wrong with that? If something's worth reading, it's worth waiting for. Do we really have to have everything right now?
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#76The problem here isn't the garbage ebooks (there will always be garbage).
It's the terrible Amazon shopping experience which puts no value on the customer getting a good product. EBay (!) is much better.
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#77> Amazon is filled with garbage Full stop, no need to specify e-books. I've moved my purchasing dollars elsewhere at this point with the exception of some very specific categories. Amazon is just too unreliable.
Agreed. I let my Prime subscription expire a few days ago.
Amazon's thrown in the towel on streaming and decided it'd rather be an ad-supported model with Freevee (which also eventually inherits Prime-exclusive shows).
For the rare instances I do want to order something physical from Amazon, waiting isn't a problem. For the rest of the time, I'd rather my dollars go anywhere else.
When someone like me looks at Walmart and says "There's a more ethical alternative", Amazon might have a problem.
But I assume Amazon retail leadership is self aware they're milking the long tail of historical brand cachet while under-investing in their future, at this point.
AWS and maybe some other businesses spin off, adios to the remainder as Sears 2.0.
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle yes, but it is often far less than ideal. Popular books often have only 2 copies, physical or digital, so you need to wait in the queue for a while before you can get to read it. And that's only if your library carries the book, physical or digital -- there is often a long delay before you can find book in a bookstore and you can find it on the shelve. For various reasons the library might not want to pu…
> Popular books often have only 2 copies, physical or digital, so you need to wait in the queue for a while before you can get to read it. Wait in the queue? What's fundamentally wrong with that? If something's worth reading, it's worth waiting for. Do we really have to have everything right now ?
>What's fundamentally wrong with that?
Nothing of course, patience is a lost virtue and relevant to the topic of the thread, it's no accident that the only thing Amazon has gotten better at is shipping garbage faster.
In fact when it comes to the current popular thing, just go for the unpopular thing that nobody else is interested in because chances are there's something more interesting in it anyway. There's also this community on reddit of people who on principle wait a few years before they play games. Time is literally the best filter. Anything that's popular and good will still be interesting in three years.
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#79Not just e-books, garbage print too! Link below. The kid likes brain teasers, so I'll grab a book here and there. The last one I ordered was seemingly AI generated. The wording was off, the answers were either completely incorrect, or theoretically correct but not matching the question or parameters asked. I can't quite remember the last time I became as infuriated at a...book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CQQPPQ…
The cover looks pretty AI-generated to me too. No object on the cover makes any sense.
Re: Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made
#80> Amazon is filled with garbage Full stop, no need to specify e-books. I've moved my purchasing dollars elsewhere at this point with the exception of some very specific categories. Amazon is just too unreliable.
Right. After I got a recall notice on some Amazon vitamins because they were counterfeit, I stopped ordering much of anything from Amazon.
A competing "direct from the manufacturer" sales site would be useful. Only the business that actually makes the thing could sell it. No intermediaries.