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Amazon has a book piracy problem

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Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#31

Post by riazrizvi »

eikenberry wrote: post #11

This is what copyright was actually for... Publishers would put out a book, it'd get popular then cut-rate copies would swamp the market. Copyright was done to protect the publisher from this sort of abuse (and secondarily the author, as the publisher was their only means of reaching an audience). This should be the top (and only IMO) priority of CC enforcement instead of going after sci-hub and the like.

IMO Safaribooksonline is the gold standard of content piracy. In the sense of how rampant it is.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#35

Post by __mharrison__ »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #27
WoodenChair wrote: post #12

I'm also a Manning author and this also happened to me a couple years ago. Amazon was allowing a counterfeit Kindle edition of Classic Computer Science Problems in Python to pose as legitimate on my own book's page! Only emailing Jeff got a solution. Manning seemed powerless to solve the problem themselves. I still have some bad reviews as a result of that counterfeit Kindle edition that plague my book page. Totally…

I can understand how physical copies of counterfeit books get co-mingled with legit inventory, whether they are printed from PDF or "re-covered" from destroyed copies ... but how does one simply upload a counterfeit Kindle edition at all?

One simply uploads it to Amazon. They (Amazon) don't vet it and the pirate gets to ride on your coattails. All of this pirating would be easy to prevent, but one wonders why they even enable this?

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#36

Post by solardev »

randcraw wrote: post #16
codeslave13 wrote: post #2

Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible. My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba as thats where half the crap is from anyway.

A better search engine (esp for used books) is BookFinder: https://bookfinder.com . Between it and Goodreads, which has better ratings anyway, you can avoid Amazon entirely.

...and aside from Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon), bookfinder is also hosted behind Amazon Cloudfront.

No matter where you go and what you do, Amazon wins, lol.

There's https://www.indiebound.org/ at least, which lets you search the inventory of local bookstores.

I've also had good luck ordering used books from https://www.thriftbooks.com/ instead of Amazon.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#37

Post by __mharrison__ »

not2b wrote: post #18

Can't the ripped off authors and publishers sue Amazon for big money for this? Or maybe band together and bring a class action suit?

Perhaps. Someone who responded to my original tweet opined that Amazon and Google could kill the pirate market easily. It doesn't appear to be something that either wants to do.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#38

Post by rmbyrro »

diamondap wrote: post #21
elcapitan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With books, Amazon has become the opposite of a search engine for me. I have to use external resources to actually find the right titles, to enter them 1:1 into Amazon search to get to the books. Context based discovery has become next to impossible (which I used it before a lot for). Something must have changed in their indexing algorithm a while ago. Also many results are flooded with garbage, like some ridiculous…

Amazon kind of gave up on discovery, at least for books, when they realized they could make more money running ads. I sell books on Amazon. Years ago, their book pages had two carousels of "similar titles" on each book detail page. Similar titles were selected by some pretty helpful algorithms based on what purchasers of the current title had also purchased, as well as some other secret sauce. At the time, ads weren'…

Interesting. The algorithmic recommendations still work well for me. I discover a lot of good books swiping the carousel.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#39

Post by __mharrison__ »

iasay wrote: post #3

If they got rid of marketplace sellers and actually got control over their supply chain then they might actually go up in people's opinion. However Amazon and AWS isn't about doing a good job, it's about doing a mediocre job and making everyone happy though apologies. And that's why I'm still using them. They are a good balance.

Not sure why enabling piracy is a good balance. Care to expound on that?

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#40

Post by copperx »

WoodenChair wrote: post #12

I'm also a Manning author and this also happened to me a couple years ago. Amazon was allowing a counterfeit Kindle edition of Classic Computer Science Problems in Python to pose as legitimate on my own book's page! Only emailing Jeff got a solution. Manning seemed powerless to solve the problem themselves. I still have some bad reviews as a result of that counterfeit Kindle edition that plague my book page. Totally…

What's Jeff's email? I need to right a few wrongs.
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