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.
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 "notebooks" with similar titles to the searched book or product name.
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't very prominent, and they were profitable for authors. I could buy them for 5 cents a click and even if only one in fifty clicks resulted in a purchase, I made money.
Now, most of the algorithmic recommendations are gone, and for many ads, Amazon suggests bids of $2.50 or more per click. Those clicks bring in money whether Amazon makes a sale or not.
To some extent, they've given up on matching customers to the best or most suitable products. Why should they work that hard if ads are more profitable?
They've also had problems with piracy and counterfeits, as mentioned in this article. I heard a radio interview with a Target executive a couple years ago where a journalist said, "Amazon is underpricing you on everything. How do you plan to stay in business?"
She said, "We vet every product on our shelves. We know who makes it and where, whether it's legit, and whether it contains lead paint and parts kids can choke on. Try to find that info on Amazon."
The reporter didn't seem too impressed at the time, but the Target woman clearly saw where things were going. As the quality, authenticity, and reliability of Amazon's merchandise has declined, people are starting to notice.
I'm not sure this is a problem they will ever have the will to fix. While they break even or lose money on genuine goods they have to ship for free, profits from third party sellers and Chinese drop shippers keep the retail operation afloat.
Amazon used to have a great recommendation page that had a tab for new releases and coming soon. This was incredible for book discovery and they got so much money from me with these pages.
Amazon is currently recommending me shower heads and bathroom hardware from when I remodeled a month ago because I bought that stuff then. Pointless.
Yup. Buy a printer and you'll see recommendations after you purchase one for every other printer in existence, rather than say, ink, toner for the one you did.
I am actually working on this very problem and trying to make book discovery magical and more of an experience, we just turned 14 months old and slowly working toward more unique approaches -> https://shepherd.com/
For now, you can look for books based on Wikipedia topic (I analyze them using NLP/ML to find connections), or via another favorite book or author. At the heart of everything is 5,000+ authors who recommend their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood.
This is somewhat of an aside about Target, but I've noticed that their inventory has moved significantly upmarket in the last 10 years or so. Their long-term strategy appears to be distinguishing themselves from the "bottom-of-the-barrel low-cost stuff" market and settling in a "low-cost but still decent stuff" niche.
Thing is, even Walmart vets their inventory. This problem has been going on long enough that I've been telling friends & family not to purchase anything that goes on or in your body from Amazon due to counterfeit issues. Whereas, with Walmart I am pretty well assured that if I buy a can of green giant corn it's actually produced by that company.
Sure, it's definitely possible for counterfeits to sneak into their supply chain, but that is only possible via employees or suppliers defrauding Walmart. Walmart also loses on this, so they are incentivised to audit and prevent this, since they actually hold and own the inventory. Whereas Amazon has zero incentive (or ability) to audit their supply chain, since the inventory they hold is actually owned by someone else. [aside-yes, I know that frito lay, nestle, etc actually own their inventory in Walmart and just merchandise the space]. Target definitely has moved upmarket, but even their low cost competitor has far tighter controls than Amazon.
I would even speculate that Walmart has less likelihood of counterfeits in the supply chain than target, having been tangentially involved with a vendor getting into each retailer. Walmart is incredibly mercenary with their suppliers, and due to their size they can get away with very onerous terms. I tend to dislike them for this, but I will admit I'm impressed with their supply chain management and they certainly don't leave opportunities for fraud available to their suppliers.
Yep, and they also don't fulfill those orders fro Walmart stores. 3rd party seller orders are shipped outside of their logistics chain.
Id argue that the marketplace is still a strategic misstep, but I understand why they did it. Managers want to show they are keeping up with Amazon, and the only way to offer the selection they do is to allow 3rd party sellers.
However, for physical inventory in a Walmart, that is a different thing entirely. Plus, who shops at Walmart online? I have family who are enamored with their online ordering (physical store pickup) and they all have complained about the 3rd party sellers. To a person, they have all said 'if I want to have stuff shipped to me, why wouldn't I use Amazon?'
Amazon is currently banking on their generous return policy and favorable customer service. Most of what they sell is available on AliExpress, but good luck returning something ordered direct from Ali. I don't want to speculate on Amazon's downfall, since they have a dominant enough position to coast for decades, but it seems to me they are making fundamental business mistakes. Most of my peers treat them as a place to order cheap crap, I get the feeling that consumer sentiment is that stuff ordered fron Amazon is even lower quality than Walmart. But direct to door is convenient, and they have enough inertia to last a long time before failing.
Heh, I feel like that has been Target's target demographic (excuse the pun) for at least 20 years (I don't have anecdotal evidence before that). They have things that aren't designer/high cost, but at the same time are not bottom of the barrel low cost things.
On a similar note, all my general-purpose electrical stuff (power strips, cables, etc) comes from brick and mortar stores now, because I just can't trust that the same items from Amazon, or even from Wal-mart's awful online 'marketplace', won't burn my house down.
A store is the worst place for discovery. They want you to buy what makes them the most money. This isn't just an Amazon problem it goes for every retailer.
You cannot get good independent advice from someone who wants to make money off you.
Yea, Amazon is absolutely terrible as a book seller. It's virtually impossible at times to distinguish between certain editions. The other day, I found an error in that clicking on a paperback edition took me to a completely different book. There's nowhere in the entire page to report that as wrong. And I have also found it increasingly hard to find books via their search. I have even had a few cases of the exact title of the book bringing up no search results, while I could perform the search in Google, and Google would find the Amazon listing for the book.
> The other day, I found an error in that clicking on a paperback edition took me to a completely different book.
I also just found this except in the opposite direction. I wanted an ebook version of a paperback book. The publisher has paper and electronic versions of all of their books, but somehow clicking Kindle version of Book A is linked to a Kindle version of Book B... and apparently a Kindle version of Book A just isn't available on Amazon.
I ended up buying the ebook from the publisher's site directly, which came in mobi, epub, and pdf formats. I thought "oh, I'll just drop this into the Kindle app so my notes and highlights will sync across devices". I was shocked to discover that's not even really possible with a third party purchased ebook. Eventually I gave up on that and just used the PDF edition and made notes in highlights in Preview after the Kindle macOS app and Kindle iOS apps lost all of my notes and highlights trying to sync twice.
I've made a habit of going to Open Library (https://openlibrary.org/) to search for books. More often than not I can even see the full text of the book if I just want to see a chapter or something.
And then once you find the book and get it shipped to you it gets destroyed in shipping because they put it in a padded envelope or a box with zero padding. Every book that I've ordered from them has been damaged. I quit ordering books once it happened the fourth time.
Aside, but I truly don't understand how Amazon can get away with how poorly they pack product. I work on the IT management side of fulfillment, and have been involved with shipping vendor negotiations as well as auditing our return/damage/shipping claims. Amazon routinely ships product in comically oversized boxes which increases the likelihood of damage to the point it is a meme.
Having worked on it, I get that sizing packaging is a tremendously complex optimization problem that even other experienced programmers underestimate the complexity. The options for different package size grow factorially with different product selections, and it isn't possible to have every size box available in a packing station. However, it isn't an unsolvable problem to pack better. Optimizing split shipments to increase effeciency is tremendously complex, but calculating the box size needed for an order is actually pretty trivial (ignoring packing density, which is oddly often a reasonable assumption for shipping goods to the consumer). Amazon can certainly improve here, just by using routing packages to a packing station with a closer box size and having differing box sizes in each station.
I have always assumed that, given their scale, Amazon doesn't necessarily face the same price hit that a normal shopper faces when sending an oversize package. I have gotten multiple shipments from Amazon that were so oversize that, at my company's shipping pricing, would likely result in a net loss due to shipping cost. However, I suspect that Amazon has negotiated rates that insulate them from this, and the shipping companies take a loss on individual packages to gain the volume.
What amazes me is that the FTC doesn't address the problem. You'd think they'd care. This has been going on for years; you really can't tell whether you're buying genuine products or not on Amazon anymore. I've stopped buying anything where I actually care about the provenance (like power tools and anything personal hygiene related) on Amazon.
The FTC does do some things, but below a certain threshold it doesn’t bother. There is lots and lots and lots of crime that does not get prosecuted or otherwise litigated.
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.
I’ve been using bookfinder since it was mxbf.com There have been some long out of print hard to find books that I was able to find thanks to them (although in one case early in the site’s lifetime, I found a book I’d been searching for for over a decade and placed an order only to have the bookseller discover that they apparently had either sold the book, lost it or had it stolen). It’s my go-to for used books.
I remember getting obviously burned DVDs run through terrible label makers back in the day. Now they're copying all the the art and packaging for box sets.
I'm both impressed at the work they put in, and also confused why they occasionally leave obvious errors like typos on the box after all that work.
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.
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).
It's more involved than that. You can buy a brand name product shipped and sold by Amazon.com and still end up with a counterfeit item because Amazon mixes inventory with third party sellers.
You can also go to bookshop.org, buy the book there (usually for about the same price as Amazon), and most of the profit goes to a local bookstore (which you can choose) instead of a big search engine with warehouses.
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 unfair!
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?
> Amazon was allowing a counterfeit Kindle edition of Classic Computer Science Problems in Python to pose as legitimate on my own book's page!
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.
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.
Originally. But then publishers got greedy ("greed is forever") and instead of a relatively short term of protection before becoming public domain we now have stupid multi-decade restrictions. Those prevent us from printing good out of print books and do not give any benefit to either publisher or the author.
I agree with this. It would be nice to have a reduced grace period for books before they're public domain - something like 40 years seems reasonable to me.
I think I like that idea more. My lean to 40 years is just to satisfy the needs of some academic IPs. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to categorise IP duration though
I think the applications could be protectable, not the pure academic research. If there is no clear practical benefit in 10 years, do not prevent others from working on those findings to try for something more practical.
To me, 5-7 years seems reasonable for technology inventions (patents), 7-10 years for books and other art.
> 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.
That doesn’t sound right. There was a thriving trade in unauthorized editions of American books in England and English books in America in the nineteenth century, since there was no mutually recognized copyright between the two countries and there was money to be made selling, e.g., Dickens’s novels in the U.S., especially if there wasn’t any need to pay the author. The ability to make photographic plates from printed material (a technology developed in the second half of the nineteenth century) also reduced the cost of typesetting.
Dickens is a pretty big outlier in sales longevity. The percentage of books that are still selling copies 100 years after they're published rounds to 0%.
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.
Amazon 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 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 when I had an iphone, and a few years ago when apple did not prevent abuse I just stopped installing apps. The app market had jumped the shark and become a cesspool.
Nice apps I liked were bought and monetized in unethical ways, and apple didn't care.
For example, I had an app called gas cubby, which let me locally - on the phone - keep track of all my vehicles. I could enter detailed information about each car such as year, make, model, vin, insurance policy, gas purchases, oil changes and the like. It would tell you gas mileage and remind you of upcoming maintenance.
One day, the app was updated and all my local data was uploaded to the cloud!
Another app, camscanner plus purchased by tencent basically did the same thing.
My general feeling is that commerce has jumped the shark. You can make so much more money with scamming, the honest businesses are few and far apart. And nigh impossible to identify.
It doesn't feel like a platform problem, more of a societal fabric unraveling.
If there's no enforcement of anti-fraud laws or consumer protections, why not scam people? As you said, it's more profitable than legitimate business. We live in the golden age of fraud.
Another app, camscanner plus purchased by tencent basically did the same thing.
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.
This is crazy when you think that if you upload a YT video with 10 seconds of a Beatles song in it, the YT copyright engine will be on you in minutes, "demonetizing" your vid. YT can spot copyrighted audio and punish it automatically, while Amazon can't recognize a whole book including covers as a violation.
You are legally allowed to buy a book and resell it. If you look, many of the legitimate offers for books on Amazon that are "from the long tail" of content are coming the inventory of small book stores, both used and new. The issue is not that third parties are selling a book at all but that the book they are shipping is a third-party low-quality re-print of the book in question instead of an official copy, something you wouldn't know until you receive the book.
That is going to be the fight of the next generation. Inappropriate videos on YouTube for kids, extremist propaganda in Facebook or fake products in Amazon all have that soulless automation as main culprit. (Let's not talk about Roblox)
Cost goes against resilience and quality. You can automate things to a limit until everything breaks down.
This analogy doesn't really hold here – programmers are usually paid to write some code that doesn't yet exist. You can write it as open source, too – if your contract allows this (e. g. https://commonform.org/switchmode/switchmode/3.0.1; although more often it's an informal agreement that your employer will open source the work in question).
I recently purchased a book that I was really looking forward to from Amazon and received a counterfeit version with the correct cover but complete nonsense inside. It wasn't the book I purchased at all just a scam. It was super frustrating and I returned it and will not be purchasing books from Amazon ever again, but I wonder what was even the purpose of the scam? Isn't everyone just going to get annoyed and return it? What would the seller even get out of this?
If Amazon doesn't hold money in an escrow (which, apparently, is not the case), the scammers get a free loan and they can run away with the money at some point. Also, I think some % doesn't return counterfeit items, even the most garbage ones.
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 some people got “buy local” hammered into their brains without any thought as to when doing so is actually beneficial.
> 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.
This. There's an indie in DC I used before I moved away and I still use them and rely on them for suggestions and doing a little homework for me. Would rather support a small, local business in the town where I lived for 20+ years. And, when my husband wants a particular book, the kids get a link to that shop and they know we don't do Amazon so they buy from the indie.
Slightly off-topic, but I've recently heard from some corners of the collecting world that this is a major issue for video game resellers on Amazon (and other platforms) as well. People regularly receive flash carts with stuck-on labels (i.e. stolen trademarks) on them and a pirated ROM running on counterfeited hardware. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible in some cases to identify a well-crafted fake from a genuine copy before purchase, and the burden is thus placed on Amazon to take action against sellers of the products. Given that the loss of one consumer in a relatively niche yet very competitive market will not deal significant damage to Amazon's overall profits, (and that Amazon can feasibly shift blame towards the seller,) the issue persists.
All of this is to say that the idea of pirated books proliferating on Amazon is entirely feasible if electronic devices can be so successfully faked. However, what's not lost on me is the irony of Amazon, a marketplace whose initial success was anchored by trust in its ability to deliver books, falling victim to such schemes in this specific market space.
Amazon has a problem of over-optimization. They treated everything as tiny optimizable problems, including hiring. Now they hire only people that optimized themselves to pass the interviews, who then optimize to climb the ranks but don't bring that much to the behemoth. And it is the same for many of their products, optimized for artificial markers and slowly becoming irrelevant. The search engine of the store is a perfect illustration of that. And the sellers on the platform as well.
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.
Does Amazon have an incentive to fix this? This is the equivalent of Facebook or Twitter removing all bots. In this case they are much more directly seeing revenue. The only people losing are the authors and manufacturers of the original product. I see consumers don’t care and in fact actively buy the lower priced item and are happy about it. If they were to fix it, they need a huge operation to create a system to identify, vet, enforce originality across every single product on their platform. It’s almost impossible at amazon’s scale. They will never do anything about it. May be this is a business opportunity for a new company to come in and provide as Amazon will surely not be able to replicate overnight.
So... I'm sure it's not as easy as I think it should be, but isn't this just a DMCA takedown notice away from getting fixed? As much as the DMCA is generally horrible and abused, this seems like an actually good use for it.
Of course, the counterfeit seller can just create a new account, and then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, but perhaps that could be grounds for a lawsuit against Amazon directly, for failing to rein in all the copyright infringement occurring on their platform. (Maybe even a class action, since this problem seems widespread.)
Again, I'm sure this isn't easy or fun (or cheap) to do, but tweeting at people to not buy your book from Amazon seems to be... not all that useful a response?
This is just one example of a broader problem with Amazon. It has become essentially a vehicle for automated salesbots to push anonymously manufactured goods of all kinds---not just books---to as many buyers as possible, drowning out storefronts for identifiable manufacturers and retailers who might have legal right via copyright or licensing to sell similar, often higher-quality versions.
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.
Which 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 that brands are diluted or merchandise is authentic. Because that just ensures people trust AmazonBasics that much more. There are no downsides for Amazon.
The flipside of this is that the utter and flippant disregard for the basic principles of copyright are also responsible for one of the biggest expansions of freedom of speech in human history. The legal liability for copyright infringement itself, imposed upon every "link in the chain", was enough to deter people from running "content" pipes; and there was no distinguishing factor between a "publisher" that actively decides what content to publish, and a "platform" which does not. CDA 230 and DMCA 512 invented this new legal category of platforms that facilitate speech but do not editorialize it, and gave them broad immunity from basically every legal challenge.
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.
Nowadays I do what François recommends in his tweet. Go to our local bookstore and order from there. The extent to which Amazon enables this kind of behavior and presumably also profits from it and the extent to which they ignore the problem altogether shouldn't be supported.
Speaks to a larger problem as well, the excuses platforms make to not do due diligence when it comes to what is being sold and the lack of ability to talk to a real person on the other end quickly.
Amazon absolutely sucks for buying books. It's not just the counterfeits, but the way they now ship books in flimsy paper envelopes. The last book I ordered from Amazon (because it was not available at other retailers) was left on my porch, in a paper envelope, during a rainstorm. Book obviously got wet and now has that distinct "wavy" look.
Amazon has a UI problem. Unless you have a kindle it's extremely hard to buy a book and just get the god damn epub file. It's so much harder than pirating the book that I am not surprised. A few times I had to do it too: I would buy the book in the store and then go download it from a pirate website because amazon UI is too much pain
Judging from HN comments I guess it is not that well known in the US but Book Depository [1] ships worldwide. It was founded by a former Amazon employee and acquired by Amazon.
That seems likely. Book publishers are also less exploitative than record companies. If you look at the copyright notice in a book, with rare exceptions it will be Copyright 2022 by A. U. Thor, while on music it will be Copyright 2022 by Exploitive Records, Inc.
Then there’s finances. When a publisher pays you an advance on royalties, if your book never sells enough to earn those royalties, you will not have to pay back the advance (although, for a two-book deal, it might reduce the effective amount of money you get on the second book, depending on how the contract is written, which is why a good agent is necessary). The publisher shoulders all the production, editing, distribution and publicity costs. With a recording contract, all the costs of recording are deducted from the artist’s royalties and many bands have had a hit record where they ended up owing the record company money. And for all of that, as noted above, the record company claims ownership of the recording that the band paid for.
TV/movie production ends up being somewhere between the two. Not as exploitative as the record companies, not as genteel as the publishers.
