The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 10:58 PM UTC

aerhardt wrote: post #190

pfdietz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Amazon couldn't do that?

Because Penguin Random House is one of the "Big Five" publishers. I can bet the house that Amazon treats it as a key strategic account within their Books department. They have to deal with them face-to-face regularly. It would be grossly negligent to do this without their consent, not to mention illegal. It's as if Amazon started selling pirated Nintendo games. Someone from Nintendo would be on their arses in very li…

Post by encrypted_bird » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:01 AM UTC

1313ed01 wrote: post #130

g947o wrote: post #26

Somewhat related: Amazon has a huge fake ebook problem as well. I recently spent $2 buying an ebook that is still copyrighted. It is cheaper than the first item in search result that has more reviews. I thought, it's an ebook, what could go wrong. Upon opening it, I found that the formatting is completely off. Words are concatenated. It was impossible to read. A few days later, I noticed that the book is gone from Am…

I was happy a few years ago when I found a site selling DRM-free EPUBs on many topics I am interested in, but with no prior warning last week they sent out an email saying they no longer do that and instead you have to buy and read books through some special app. They could at least have warned a few days in advance. I would have stocked up on several lifetimes of books to read. A bit skeptic about post-2022 books an…