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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

This article reads like a poorly researched PR piece for the publishing industry.

They're not really saying anywhere.the books by third party sellers are fake. Then they must have come from the publisher legitimately one way or the other and hence the publisher must have been paid. The only difference is how much he was paid. It's likely some country branch of the publisher cut a deal to unload some books for cheap to a distributor and that's coming back to Amazon. So the publishing executive in that market made lot's of revenue in his scorecard at the cost of cannibalizing Amazon account seller's business.

This sort of thing is quite common and perfectly legal.

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Unless you're buying a relatively new book, book buying on Amazon is an incredibly painful experience. I've given up almost altogether. There are a number of outright fakes, but the main problem is the massive number of really crappy print-on-demand OCR/scanned books.

The only way I do continue to buy books on Amazon if they're sold by Amazon and fulfilled by Amazon, which it sounds like that will generally be less findable. It simply isn't worth the trouble. I have no sympathy for the publishers - I have no problem at all buying used books - but there is more to the story.

You must be in a different market niche than me. I buy a lot of books and I've had no issues at all, even from third-party sellers of old books.

I don't doubt that this is your experience. Personally, I've benefited greatly from buying used books from third parties on Amazon. Unusual books that are long out of print, useful for my research, for $5 shipped? It's great. And so far, they've all been in near-perfect condition - usually books sold by libraries that have never or rarely been checked out.

I have no problem with the quality of used books, when they are what they say they are. I buy anything old or unusual on AbeBooks for the most part, which apparently is part? owned by Amazon. There are some POD results, but they seem to be mostly correctly labeled and to not flood the marketplace nearly as much. I own a lot of books that were printed in the 1800s but still in great shape.

This phenomenon is definitely most prominent in the market we're talking about (though I've also seen it with much newer books), so to take an example, consider Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...

The first print copy in my search results is titled "History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia - Frederick The Great-Complete Table of Contents: 22 Volumes". This is literally a print-on-demand copy of the table of contents. The first reviewer also notes that it's "hard to read." It also costs $10. The next print edition is also a POD of the table of contents. The next is a print edition of the "first volume" (what the first volume actually consists of is not mentioned; the work was published in different editions with different volume counts) by Forgotten Books, which is a relatively OK POD publisher. (I would buy it if truly desperate, but not normally.)

Continuing to go through this search, I can't confidently find a single good copy of any volume. I think maybe the "Elibron Classics" copy of Volume X is good. Some of the POD are better than others. Some of them are clear scams - for example, the "Works of Thomas Carlyle" for $14.40 that claims to be his complete works...in 336 pages. (Carlyle's actual complete works would fill quite a bit more space.) I think the $1500 one on page 2 might be good, but there's no picture.

It's not that good, cheap copies of the book don't exist. I recently bought a full set of an 1900 edition for $80, which was still higher than I liked, but finding full used sets can be difficult. Here's tons of copies of "real" volumes: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Carlyle&so...

This is an especially egregious example, since I don't think the book has been reputably printed since 1969 and it's in the public domain; for most books the bad stuff is merely interleaved, instead of being almost all you can find.

That sounds frustrating. But thanks for the reminder about Abe's.

Didn't Amazon acquire Abe's like 10 years back?

yes, they were acquired in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks

A few years ago, I started losing trust in Amazon as what was once a straight forward transaction began to look more and more like an algorithmic semi-scam. I would look for some item and the featured results would be 20% or more than the same item in some duplicated form.

For many years Amazon's business model was to generate revenue off of straight forward sales transactions. Today it has shifted to rents and extractions. Prime is perhaps a good first example. Using it complicates transactions and Amazon can arbitrage the eligibility and price of items to extract additional revenues on the fly.

However, textbooks are the prime of example of Amazon's new more extractive business practices. It's not just that Amazon wholeheartedly adopted the text book industry's obscene pricing models rather than disrupting them. Nor is it just that Amazon has extended the obscene pricing to rent out ebook versions of textbooks. No, the best expression of Amazon's newly found extractive business practices is in the availability and pricing of used older editions of textbooks on its platform. In the old days, Amazon was a steady source for fairly inexpensive obsolescent editions of current textbooks. Once Amazon seriously entered the textbook business, that seems to have changed and bargains available with deliberate search have disappeared.

There really was a change of mindset with Amazon Prime. It was a manifestation of a business cultural value that all customers are not equal as individuals. Maybe it is possible to position an ecommerce site as an upscale brand while still selling Schenzhen's spinners and iPhone cases and unlisted electronics of dubious safety for $0.01.

As I've lost trust in Amazon, I've started using Ebay for online purchases. Ebay is orders of magnitude more transparent. Transparency is a good way to create trust. It helps that Ebay's business model is not grossly misaligned with my wallet. It helps that the marker of trust is between buyer and seller rather than stars based on customer reviews. A seller with 10,000 transactions and 99% positive rating is a better indicator of an item's quality than 4 stars based on twenty reviews.

How is ebay better? The only counterfeit item I have bought on either site was a dell laptop charger on ebay a few years ago. It used to overheat and stopped working after only a few weeks use. Another time a product was never shipped and I had to go through the paypal dispute resolution process which worked fine if a little slowly. I'd have thought ebay would suffer from the same problems as amazon with counterfeit products and fake reviews and then it also has the whole shill bids problem. I moved over to amazon for almost all my online shopping and so far have not had a problem though I appreciate that may just be luck on my part.

I'm not sure how / what these folks who keep apparently getting scammed are buying, but I have ~200 books purchased in my history with 3/4 of them most likely used, and none have been fakes.

I constantly buy / add to my wishlist older hardcover books I'm interested in reading and will come back and check when the used price is low and buy either Like New / Very Good / Good and have been satisfied with the results. Nothing like getting a 800+ page hardcover book with barely any use delivered to your door for 6-10$.

If one is worried about quality don't by anything used that is less than Very Good IMO.

I don't disagree that a person can buy shoddy goods on either site. The difference for me is that as a marketplace, Ebay is more transparent. The article points out a specific instance of Amazon's opacity where the buyer has no information about the actual seller.

Maybe the merchant is Amazon itself and hence a fairly reliable seller. Maybe the merchant is some other less reliable seller. Maybe the the merchant has the item in stock. Maybe it does not. Maybe the price shown is in the buyer's interest. Maybe it is not the same as someone else might see.

The difference for me, is that in general Ebay has structured its business so as to create little incentive for manipulating individual transactions in an extractive way. As a marketplace, Ebay tends to provide consistent and reliable information to buyers (as well as sellers) regarding price and the transaction history of the counter party.

Now all this is with the caveat that I generally use Ebay as a replacement for Amazon and therefore am not heavily invested in the auction process. Usually the only time a enter an Ebay auction over buy-it-now is when the auction is ending soon and there's not much bid activity and the item is on the long tail...I don't use usually use Ebay to buy high demand or high ticket items via auction.

But again, for me it is that I find Amazon's purchase process is often untrustworthy. Essentially, Amazon's search is broken when measured against my economic interests (and great when measured against Amazon's). In short, Amazon has become an adversarial marketplace where my adversary is the house. Ebay's auctions are adversarial, but I'm not up against the platform and the economics of the transaction for me do not depend on how the platform leaks information...and there are few incentives for Ebay to evolve in that way and many incentives for Amazon to do so.

I was with you until eBay! Unless something dramatically changed, eBay invented the shitty reseller business model when it began catering to power sellers and ignoring the multitude of scams in the market.

Ebay has evolved during the same time periods that Amazon has evolved, though my observation is that in the opposite direction toward increasing trust via transparency in the market. On Ebay, increased transparency is aligned with the common interest of trustworthy power sellers. Amazon has one power seller and increased opacity is in its interests.

i wish there was a setting for this. i really don't like the third party system on amazon.

Personally, I've transitioned to the library and local bookstore model for my book purchases.

I'm not saying this accounts for the entirety of the crappy print-on-demand issue you're seeing, but it might account for some: a lot of big publishers make their backstock be POD if it's old enough.

For instance, at the bookstore I work at, when we order older Penguin Classics books directly from Penguin Random House, there's at least a 50% chance that we're going to get crappier POD copies from them, the publisher. We list our store's inventory on Amazon, and there have been a few times when a customer returned such books to us, angry that we sent them a POD copy, even after I explained they're actually the copies the publisher sent.

That said, we sometimes order books off Amazon for a customer when they're from a publisher we're not planning on placing an order with anytime soon, and it's downright appalling how many sellers send beat up used books as "new" books, or send falling-apart books as "used" books. Can't say we've seen a lot of POD books come in that way, unless they're from tiny publishers who do most/all of their books that way.

I honestly don't understand how Amazon is still a thing in the US. At least hn and Reddit discussions make it seem like there are a lot of fake products being sold. Is it extremely overblown?

In Germany I've never had this problem and never heard of others having it.

I guess this goes to show how unrepresentative online commentary can be, and how easily unrepresentative info can distort our mental model of the world.

Far from "not still being a thing", Amazon is absolutely massive in the US, and usage continues to grow at a fast clip. I've never had a problem with fake goods, and I've never met anyone in person who has. Then again, I buy primarily from Amazon or the manufacturer selling on Amazon. It might be because the UI pushes third party sellers.

It is likely the same people in every thread complaining about the issues they find in some niche book market most people don't care about. They are likely telling the truth but it also probably doesn't affect that many people.

I would agree that the problem decreases with the popularity and recency of the book. If you're talking about a newly published bestseller, which is what I imagine most people buy, your chances of running across a fake are pretty small in my experience.

I would be afraid that this could change that, though - especially when e-book editions are released concurrently, it takes only a modicum of effort for a scammer to pirate the book and produce a realistic looking fake. (The advantage here, I suppose, is at least the presence of an official e-book means a professionally edited fake, rather than what you tend to see for out-of-print/old books.) Part of what makes that experience so much smoother is generally speaking, right now, if you go search for a new and/or very popular book, you'll be buying from the publisher or from Amazon.

How would you know that you didn't receive a counterfeit?

If I can't tell the difference, does it matter to me?

I haven't had bad experiences with books on amazon, but amazon sold me a charger with a fake Intertek mark (Intertek is an UL competitor). When I told amazon their response was to refund the purchase (good), but continue selling the charger (um, are you fucking kidding me?)

product: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY

Intertek's statement: http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359...

Shameless plug for the Friends of Washoe County Library, to which I have a personal connection and can attest to their books being 100% real (and cheap!). Selection probably ain't great (it relies on book donations, and it only includes the books with high estimated value; the cheaper books are sold in-person by the bag), but it's certainly a start.

Do you actually buy things on Amazon? Have you bought things from third party sellers? Maybe third party sellers aren't selling fake books yet, but no doubt they will be soon.

I spends thousands of dollars a year on Amazon, and I simply won't buy from third party sellers because they're notorious for selling counterfeits, having terrible shipping, problematic returns, etc. It's easier to avoid them altogether than it is to go through the hassle and disappointment of dealing with the bad ones, and there are a lot of bad ones. On top of that, Amazon apparently just doesn't care - I've seen product pages where 50% (or more) of the reviews claim they got a counterfeit that didn't work, yet the counterfeit seller(s) is still the default option.

The third party seller program has completely undermined the trust I had in Amazon. In the past I'd buy on Amazon because I could trust I was getting a legitimate product with a solid return policy that would arrive on schedule in a few days. All of that disappears with third party sellers.

If I can't find an item sold directly from Amazon (which is getting harder to discern), then I don't buy it on amazon.com.

I think the concerns of the "publishing industry" also apply to authors that self-publish on say, Amazon's CreateSpace.

How? As long as it is not piracy, how are they affected?

Here are some quotes from the article:

Amazon’s third-party sellers have to offer new books, not used ones, but in many cases they don’t seem to have bought their books from publishers. No one is quite sure where their books come from, including, it seems, Amazon itself. -- Some of the comments in this thread link to pictures of counterfeit books.

If the Buy Box winner for a book is out of stock, it will look to most customers as though the book is out of stock everywhere. -- This would cost the author a sale. Many shoppers don't realize that the Buy Box is only one merchant out of many.

This policy is part of Amazon’s ongoing, years-long quest to drive down the price of books. -- See the App Store for the endgame of race-to-the-bottom prices.

How would an offer which is out of stock win the buy box? I'm pretty sure that if there's at least one seller with stock, that the buy box would show one of them.

Did you read the article? This was mentioned and multiple tweets were quoted.

Yes, I did. And followed the links in the Tweets. The article suggests that it's possible that the buy box winner is out of stock, whilst at least one seller (Amazon or a third party seller, e.g. the publisher) is in stock. The tweets don't assert that. The links and screenshots referred to by the tweets also demonstrate no such thing.

Specifically, regarding the tweets:

- One of the links is to an Amazon page. The winner of the buy box when I open the page is 'In stock'

- The other link is to a HuffPo article, which contains some screenshots. The screenshots include buy boxes, but none of the screenshots show a buy box that's been won by an out-of-stock seller.

Piracy/counterfeiting is a real concern

There's a potential of grey market imports. If a publisher has a lower quality, but much cheaper, product for one market, and a higher quality more expensive product for the US market, buyers should have the choice, but should also know what they're buying.

I would not be happy if a publisher would make such things. I mean there's mostly a hardcover and a paperback version, yes. but if they actually make books in lower qualities for others markets, that would be hilarious. why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products? isn't this some sort of discrimination?

> why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products

It would be even worse if customers in the poorer market only had access to products they can't afford. The important thing IMHO is that the lower quality version also has a lower price, and that, in case of re-import, there's a way for customers to know.

In a country like India, we had eastern economy and similarly other subsidized editions. If a book costs 100 USD, it is beyond range of most students, as this crosses their monthly budget.

So, while arbitrary these barriers have the place till we have movement of people.

Price discrimination, yeah. You make cheap versions of a product for people who are very price sensitive- that is, people without much money. You still make a profit, they get a version of the product they can afford.

I did this with math textbooks in college. You can buy "gray market" books, which are versions made for foreign markets but bought by resellers and reimported to the US. They're the same exact book, but printed without color, on cheap paper in a cheap binding. This was perfect for me, since they were also much cheaper than the US edition.

If anything, the discrimination was going the other way. The only way to get a cheap copy of the book was to buy it off the gray market- the punisher wouldn't sell the cheap editions inside the US.

Publishers use ISBN #s to differentiate the quality and content of their books today. Unless the publishers are trying to deceive consumers by using the same ISBN # for significantly different quality copies of a book then I don't see how this is a new risk to consumers.

Adding to this, if a seller on Amazon sends you a different ISBN than the one you ordered, you can return it, because that's not what you ordered.

Why? Unless the cheaper product is of an inferior quality than the more expensive product, then it is capitalism trying to route around an artificial cost.

Those cheaper copies for non-US markets are what's typically called (at least in the textbook world) as "international" editions. They're not allowed to be sold on Amazon, as per Amazon's policies. It's a shame too, because textbooks are usually so very expensive.

And as noted elsewhere, they have different ISBNs than the US editions, so if a seller send and int'l edition when you ordered a US edition, they did not send the book you ordered and the ISBN discrepancy proves that, so you should return it and complain to Amazon.

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