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)
Amazon has a book piracy problem
61–70 of 124 posts
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#62Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#63I'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…
Amazon tries to "unify" pages for products that are "the same", which ends up being a disaster.
A while ago I found that the page for Husain Haddawy's translation of the Arabian Nights was linked to a "Kindle version" of an entirely different work (also an edition of the "Arabian Nights", but there's a lot of room for variation in e.g. what's included, to say nothing of the translator). After some very annoying searching, I discovered that this was true even though Amazon was already selling a Kindle version of the Husain Haddawy translation. Getting this fixed didn't require emailing Jeff Bezos - a conversation with frontline customer support on the website did the job.
But the same problem exists all over Amazon. Try following the link to the "Kindle version" of any edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and you will discover a random, unrelated edition. If you follow the link back to a physical copy, you'll find a third edition. Read the reviews for any movie or TV show and you will see that they combine reviews of every DVD, Blu-ray, streaming, and probably VHS release.
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#64Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#65Amazon surely knows what they are doing. They don't care that brands are diluted or merchandise is authentic. Because that just ensures people trust AmazonBasics that much more. There are no downsides for Amazon.
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#66Amazon 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.
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…
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#67Amazon 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.
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#68Amazon has shown time and time again that they don't care. They don't care about fake reviews, counterfeit products, cheap Chinese crap, their workforce, or anything really as long as customers keep on buying.
I wonder if they are jumping the shark? I intensely dislike the paid search results or sponsored recommendations. The nonsense-name brands that are either chinese or secretly amazon that prevent brand names from showing up (and many good brands ship counterfeits). The fake reviews. The popup "extended warranty" screens where if you close the tab/window... the item doesn't make it to your shopping basket. I remember w…
I've actually shifted to just using Microsoft's Office Lens for scanning - I'd purchased the paid versions of multiple scanning apps and about 6-7 years ago I looked and every one of them seemed to be owned by a company in Russia. I wasn't real comfortable with that, so switched over to Microsoft. It may be a faceless megacorp, but I still think it's more trustworthy than anonymous Russian entities dealing with uploads and OCRs of stuff I think worth keeping.
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#69Earlier 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'…
Re: Amazon has a book piracy problem
#70Which tech companies aren't benefiting from piracy? YouTube has entire movies, songs, etc. on their platform. Sure, they take them down with a DMCA submission (legit or not). But you can't deny that them feigning ignorance and the whack-a-mole nature of their pirated content hasn't benefited them greatly. It won't change until they get hit with massive fines. Amazon surely knows what they are doing. They don't care t…
There's an argument that came out of the Copyright Office a few years ago that DMCA 512 has been grossly misinterpreted by the courts. You see, because 512 immunity only applies to things done "at the direction of the user", the courts have decided that social media recommendation engines can be immunized from suit through the 512 safe harbor. However, if that same curation is done by a human instead of an automated system, then it's no longer "at the direction of the user"[0], and the site is a publisher rather than a platform. This is absolutely bananas and I can think of no other part of law where deliberately ignoring the crime or tort makes it less criminal or tortious.
If the Copyright Office had its way, both of these activities - automated and manual curation - would take you out of your safe harbor. YouTube could host your videos, like Vimeo's pro tier, but it couldn't put them in search or on the home page unless it was willing to take on your copyright risk. Shopify could run your online store but you couldn't sell your products on Amazon.
There's been other proposals to change the process by which companies get their safe harbor, too. The EU got rid of notice-and-takedown and replaced it with license[1]-and-notice-and-filtering. The criteria for who has to abide by the new system is very roughly the same "do they curate" standard the US Copyright Office wanted put into DMCA 512, with online marketplaces - among other things - explicitly exempted from the requirements. So now our dichotomy becomes a trichotomy of "host" (no liability), "platform" (must license and filter), and "publisher" (full liability).
I'm not sure if the EU will ultimately be able to thread the needle on this. We haven't seen the full effects of EUCD Article 17 yet, but my gut instinct is that it both goes too far (targeted platforms will be overregulated) and not far enough (copyright holders will still have horrific piracy problems).
[0] See Mavrix v. LiveJournal
[1] This is technically a "best effort" standard - you are not required to actually obtain a license, since copyright holders could otherwise just refuse you one. However, unlike IETF standards, those words do not mean "lowest effort" in law. Serving EU regulators a water sandwich will likely not go well with them.