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In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

nytimes.com

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Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#31

Post by joering2 »

zwerdlds wrote: post #12

I'm genuinely curious - can someone explain how Amazon has avoided litigation on this for so long?

Who's gonna litigate them? When you hire tens of thousands of people around USA all of sudden bunch of politicians, lawyers and judges roots for you and wishes you all the best, each for different reason. I mean which prosecutor that ultimately answers in some manner to a mayor of a big city that his/her future depends of how many Amazon employees will get hired/fired, will shit in their own sandbasket and go after Besos?

Sure, if you me or Joe Doe opens an online store and have 1% of counterfeit problem than Bezos currently has, you would be SWAT-teamed, locked in jail and probably without bail too, with your finances frozen so you barely can afford a lawyer. But that's corporate America. This is business and that's how things work here in grand scheme of things when you become too big to jail/litigate.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#32

Post by magduf »

chris72205 wrote: post #5

Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are sellin…

I don't know why people rag on eBay so much. eBay is great. Well, for certain things at least. The thing people don't get is that eBay is basically like one giant outdoor sale that one company has organized, and then leased space to a bunch of small vendors who have all set up their own little tents. Some of those vendors suck, others don't, and you're going to find stuff there that you won't see at a large brick-and-mortar retail store.

If I want to find some used auto part for a MY2001 car, Ebay is the first place I'll look, and I'll probably find it there, because tons of auto recyclers use Ebay to sell their parts. If I want to buy a small quantity of some odd item, or some item only available in other countries, Ebay is again the first place to check. In short, Ebay is perfect for finding weird things you won't find anywhere else. You do have to be careful who you buy from though, but the feedback ratings do a tolerably good job of helping you here, and you won't find this on some independent website.

Amazon has indeed gotten pretty bad in a lot of ways, because you actually don't know what you're going to get, depending on who ships the thing to you. It's still OK I think with sellers that are more independent and ship their own stuff, but for those the prices aren't usually very good and you might as well just go to Ebay.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#33

Post by Tomte »

caseysoftware wrote: post #15
dmart wrote: post #14

Perhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for important texts? Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings, forewards, etc.

But what is the "main text" and who has the definitive copy? At first glance, most people would think of chapter text and headings but even that can vary from edition to edition and printing to printing and country to country and translation to translation. How are typos/corrections handled and who has the right to make them? Then we need the schema/structure for the content. And that schema has to preserve whitespac…

> But what is the "main text"

Right. See this incredible example. Both versions are authentic, in a way.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-as...

> Mitchell himself explains the reasons for the discrepancies in an interview quoted in Eve’s paper: they occurred because the manuscript of Cloud Atlas sat unedited for around three months in the US, after an editor there left Random House. Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and his editor and copy editor worked on the manuscript, but the changes were not passed on to the US.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#34

Post by jsgo »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #17
jhbadger wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And about a decade ago there was a brief humor fad that consisted of modifying public domain classic literature to add fantasy or SF features -- "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Android Karenina" and so on -- but obviously the people buying those knew that they weren't buying the original works.

Who could forget "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" ? They even made a movie of that one

PaPaZ was the one that almost got me into Audible. The lady that was reading it did it in an "aristocratic" delivery that just added to the humor.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#35

Post by magduf »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #17
jhbadger wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And about a decade ago there was a brief humor fad that consisted of modifying public domain classic literature to add fantasy or SF features -- "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Android Karenina" and so on -- but obviously the people buying those knew that they weren't buying the original works.

Who could forget "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" ? They even made a movie of that one

It certainly sounds a lot more interesting than the original version.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#37

Post by lsc »

imgabe wrote: post #19

1984 was published in 1949, 70 years ago. The author died in 1950. If it weren't for ridiculous US copyright laws, reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices and there would be no black market for low-quality knock-offs.

>reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices

so I read a lot. Mostly on the kindle. Lots of public domain classics; I love Conrad and Melville.

I'm also pretty happy to kick in ten or fifteen bucks to avoid spending time finding the best formatted/least incorrect copy, even if the book is public domain.

but you know what? when I buy public domain e-books, there's so much crap mixed in that is worse than gutenberg that I often end up going with Gutenberg first these days, if my favorite publishing houses don't have a copy.

It's actually easier, I think, for me to find quality e-books of books that are still under copyright.

I mean, this is mostly me complaining about amazon and how they aren't really serving my needs even when I'm begging them to take more of my money... but it's also a point that finding reputable public domain copies is awful hard.

For those of my taste looking... my favorite publishing house for that sort of thing is Melville house publishing; but they have something of a limited selection of public domain reprints. (they do have their 'art of the novella' series, which comes out in the cutest little paperbacks. And their kindle formatting is consistently good.)

on the other hand gutenberg formatting isn't great, but it's consistently not terrible, which is more than I can say for a lot of the dreck you find in the kindle store. And a lot of people have a different time/money equation, and sometimes books under copyright aren't available on the kindle at all and paper copies can get pricy (and are way harder to read, for me at least) so certainly public domain is a good thing that should be preserved. I'm just saying, it's not a panacea when it comes to badly-done e-books

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#38

Post by christophilus »

whatamidoingyo wrote: post #7

I buy most of my books on ebay from the seller "thrift.books", and some other goodwill ebay/physical stores. They're used, and generally around $3.00/free shipping. Some Goodwill stores have every book priced at $1.00, and have nearly everything you'd want. I'd never buy a new book again, especially from Amazon.

I just go straight to https://www.thriftbooks.com/ generally. I imagine it's the same source.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#39

Post by buckminster »

bdamm wrote: post #28
mortenjorck wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will be adding books to the list now too, but the number of categories I won’t shop for on Amazon has ballooned in just the past couple of years. It’s amazing to browse the reviews of brand-name products ranging from kitchen gadgets to yard tools, to even board games, and see customers saying things like “much cheaper plastic than the one I bought at Target” or “huge downgrade in card printing and game piece qualit…

It's definitely more work to buy authentic products than it used to be. These days I find myself aborting purchases at the checkout phase, when I can review the actual shipper of the product. If it's "fulfilled by Amazon" or a shipper I already trust, then I consider it good to go, but otherwise, I back out and start over with the same product and a different product link. Now with Amazon fulfilling for other shipper…

> Now with Amazon fulfilling for other shippers

They've been doing this for years. That's what Fulfilled By Amazon is. And no, they don't reliably check product authenticity.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#40

Post by filoleg »

magduf wrote: post #32
chris72205 wrote: post #5

Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are sellin…

I don't know why people rag on eBay so much. eBay is great. Well, for certain things at least. The thing people don't get is that eBay is basically like one giant outdoor sale that one company has organized, and then leased space to a bunch of small vendors who have all set up their own little tents. Some of those vendors suck, others don't, and you're going to find stuff there that you won't see at a large brick-and…

I don't know if this is true in 2019, but 2 years ago they didn't have a proper 2FA, only SMS verification. The issue was that someone figured out a way to get around that, and they were able to log in and buy a lot of expensive stuff.

I reported it to ebay, they reset passwords and set in motion the case to refund me. I removed the perpetrator's address info, changed everything, and two days later it repeated again (because no real 2FA, again). After this happened twice within the same week, i got tired of it, finally got my refund, and closed down my ebay account.

You would think that in this scenario, ebay would block the perpetrator by IP or would at least lock the ability to set the delivery address to the same one that the perpetrator used the first time around, but they did nothing of that sort, allowed that person to order more stuff through my account illegally, and left me with a lot of headache.

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