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Amazon has a book piracy problem

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Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#51

Post by iLoveOncall »

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.

I have thousands of orders on Amazon and have never received something different than what I expected.

Have I received items that were crap? Sure, because I chose to go with the noname item from the random seller for cost reasons. If it’s unusable I just return it.

That said, I don’t think I have even a 1% return rate. Buy items with a few reviews and read the top reviews instead of only trusting the star system and you’ll get exactly what you paid for 99% of the time (and will get your money back the remaining 1% of the time).

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#52

Post by iLoveOncall »

copperx wrote: post #40
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.

jeff@amazon.com

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#53

Post by riazrizvi »

adambatkin wrote: post #42
riazrizvi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you clarify what you mean by this? The platform formerly known as Safari Books is now O'Reilly Learning, and I have every reason to believe that it is all above-board, with proper licensing from all of the included publishers.

It appears to me that there is little policing of plagiarism.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#54

Post by was_a_dev »

This was an issue at my university last year.

Some seller was downloading PhD theses for free from the university, and selling the as ebooks.

They uploaded thousands of theses across several large fields.

It lead to the university taking legal action to remove all infringing material off of Amazon.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#55

Post by autoexec »

Spivak wrote: post #46
Johnny555 wrote: post #44

One of the suggestions to get a legit book is to visit a local bookstore -- I wonder for how many people that's a valid suggestion? My nearest bookstore is around 40 minutes away (which these days means it's around $5 in gas just to drive there), and it's a Barnes and Noble, not an independent store. Until a couple years ago I had an independent shop downtown, but they closed suddenly (before COVID)

And independent bookstore doesn’t even mean much to you because the whole reason to care that it’s independent is because it functions as a community space. All but a tiny sliver of the book profits are still getting slurped out of your community by the publisher anyway. If it’s not more convenient or cheaper, and you’re not getting value from the space existing then you might as well just buy from Amazon. It’s like…

> And independent bookstore doesn’t even mean much to you because the whole reason to care that it’s independent is because it functions as a community space.

Buying from a local independent bookstore is good for more than just supporting them for providing a community space. Buying from your local bookstore also means giving your money (at least in part) to members within your local economy.

It also means not giving your money (at least in part) to Amazon.

Both of those things are a win.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#56

Post by chucky_z »

antonymy wrote: post #7
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.

I'm the same way. I used to say "at least you can rely on books bought on Amazon" but now you can't even say that much. Alibris or eBay are more reliable online retailers for books nowadays.

Alibris is really great, and I've gotten a few hand written notes from bookstores I've bought from. Even if they're fake I'm a sucker for these kinds of things.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#57

Post by __mharrison__ »

Johnny555 wrote: post #44

One of the suggestions to get a legit book is to visit a local bookstore -- I wonder for how many people that's a valid suggestion? My nearest bookstore is around 40 minutes away (which these days means it's around $5 in gas just to drive there), and it's a Barnes and Noble, not an independent store. Until a couple years ago I had an independent shop downtown, but they closed suddenly (before COVID)

Getting self published books into local bookstores is more of a challenge.

I know a few 6-7 figure authors who only sell from their own store. (Not that this prevents someone from posting their content on Amazon).

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#58

Post by g42gregory »

I try to stay within "ships and sold from Amazon" category. It's more expensive, but it's worth for me. If that's not available, I use "ships from Amazon by the original manufacturer" only. I did not encountered much problems that way. Certainly not with books. The Amazon Marketplace itself is dicey. It feels like you taking a serious gamble. Once I ordered a $100+ textbook from the 3rd party and received a cheap international edition from India instead. On return, the seller asked to ship it back to India for $60 - $80 cost to me. I called Amazon and they just refunded the whole purchase and dealt with the seller themselves. So, in the end, it was still Ok. But I really do watch that I buy only things that, at least, ship from Amazon itself.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#59

Post by tzs »

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.

> 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).

Stephen Breyer, the recently retired Supreme Court Justice, wrote an interesting article in 1970 back when he was a law professor about that, called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright".

In it he argued that cut-rate copies swamping the market did not actually happen historically. Books made most of their money fairly shortly after publication. Copying technology was slow enough that by the time someone could get copies made and distributed there wasn't much market left for the book anyway. (Also, there weren't huge booksellers with massive inventory, or book on demand services, further making it harder for a book to get much sales after the first printing).

Now copying technology is a lot faster, and we do have huge booksellers like Amazon and book on demand services and we have ebooks so there is pretty much no cost to keeping a book available indefinitely, and so most of Breyer's points are no longer applicable even if they were possibly correct in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.

Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem

#60

Post by fernly »

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.

Bookfinder is hella useful but sometimes, especially for pre-ISBN books, https://www.addall.com/ has wider coverage.
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