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In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#12Amazing 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.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would Amazon being broken up stop people from selling illegitimate copies of books?
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.
How would this actually work in practice? Do you expect regulators to break out just the book store from the other ecommerce stuff?
Would the whole shipping network, fulfilment, and distribution centers be repeated across all of these companies or would that be a separate company? What about the vendor marketplace and ecommerce code and massive analytics systems they built? Plus customers will have to go to multiple different websites depending on what they want (babystuff.com, bookstore.com, etc)?
These companies can't simply be divided geographically and regionally like oil and telecom companies can, that's counter to how internet companies work. So it'd have to be business unit / divisional.
It's easy to throw around anti-trust laws as a panacea for all the stuff we don't like by tech companies but we seem to be missing the whole concrete picture of what that actually means in practice.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#14Conflating 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 can think of is to deceive the customer into thinking a product is more reviewed than it is.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would Amazon being broken up stop people from selling illegitimate copies of books?
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.
It does get a bit absurd. Prime Video has excellent content but having to access it through Amazon.com makes me feel like a theater is forcing me to walk through a gift shop to get to my seat.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#16Conflating 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…
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.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#17> What unites all these books is that none of them paid the author anything
He's dead. None of the copies do that. I understand that the main point here is about counterfeiting, but perhaps copyright shouldn't last more than 50 years either...
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#18Conflating 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…
It's not just the reviews. They conflate the different editions themselves (making it "logical" that there's only one set of reviews -- after all, there's only one product!), which usually gives absurd results when you go to view the kindle version of a book that exists in more than one edition.
I'm not sure who's supposed to benefit from this. Fudging the editions seems like you're going to a lot of extra trouble just to hurt your customers.
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#19> What unites all these books is that none of them paid the author anything He's dead. None of the copies do that. I understand that the main point here is about counterfeiting, but perhaps copyright shouldn't last more than 50 years either...
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 gastrointestinal disease, antibiotic-associated diarrhea, hepatic disease, osteoporosis and inflammatory bowel disease.
God forbid someone release rice that cures various gastrointestinal diseases into the wild. Someone might be cured!
Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
#20Amazing 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.
Why isn't this considered more seriously? The pirate bay wasn't selling torrents ffs, but they were targeted to hell and back.