Do you also advocate that eBay should verify every item it sells is not counterfeit?
I think eBay should verify items that are being sold by eBay, and Amazon should verify items that are being sold by Amazon, but eBay shouldn't be responsible for items being sold VIA eBay, nor should Amazon be responsible for items being sold VIA Amazon.
If they are saying Amazon is producing and selling these themselves, then that's a big deal. If they got a shipment of them that are counterfeit and are selling those, then it's a slightly less big deal IMHO, but still a serious problem.
If that's the case, ironically enough counterfeit sellers might actually end up having original products shipped / fulfilled by Amazon, which might add to the confusion, e.g. positive customer reviews on a bad listing.
I'd like to avoid being unrealistic in that I don't think a marketplace can 100% verify every item and grow to scale, but I'm also extremely annoyed at the "all or nothing" kind of false dichotomy you've presented.
I'm not trying to be insulting or glib with the following, but if you'd like to peruse several different threads in this discussion it appears Amazon has more than enough reasonable data to address an issue, but has heretofore turned a blind-yet-financially-beneficial-in-principle-eye to the situation. If a bunch of humans sitting around and spit balling can hammer down a half-dozen examples and concerns out of altruism then I think any attempts of offloading that 'check and balance' into the Amazon system is quite significant.
If they get around to it, I'd classify their pragmatic motivation as akin to "I'm sorry your feelings were hurt" moreso than "What I did hurt you and was wrong."
If the book was digital then I would say preemptive verification should be done. However, for a physical paper book how could you verify legitimacy at scale?
It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort.
What would you propose? Not trying to be confrontational, legitimately curious!
If Amazon require a machine-readable mechanism, they've the heft to provide one.
PKI or Blockchain-all-the-things.
I've worked at places with serious quality management systems, the problem isn't hard. The answer is easy and obvious: incoming inspection.
Unless "scale" means the percentage of product that passes through inspection is zero. In which case the problem is only hard because the problem isn't how to do something, the problem is how get the benefit of having done something without doing it (whether through inspection, not co-mingling, etc...).
In the case of No Starch Press, the build quality issues were noticeable without scanning the book. And even cutting the spine and covers off of a book to scan it isn't that much manual effort with the right hardware. One of the offices at my college had the cutter and bulk scanner, it was so not a big deal for them to use that they'd digitize a semester's worth of course textbooks for anyone who asked.
I mean, Fulfilled by Amazon is providing a storefront and fulfillment services for things people ship to them. If you are making the argument they should verify every item they ship then that should extend to all fulfillment providers, no?
Don't get me wrong, I think FBA and 3rd party sellers are a huge mistake for Amazon as a whole. I just disagree that the onus should be on Amazon to make sure the items people fulfill using their services are not fakes.