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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Of the last 10 books I bought on Amazon 4 were faulty prints with miscut pages, misaligned pages, misprint pages. Two of them had misprint covers. All of them were sold as new by Amazon itself. I am done with buying books from them

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Same. In general I go out of my way to not use Amazon these days, coming from a customer who was a customer when they only sold books.

80% of the time I buy something from Amazon what I get feels very much like I went to a garage sale. Defective products, opened packaging, mismatch with what was on the site, etc.

I only use Amazon.com to get the ISBN and then search it on LibGen, since most books are not being delivered in my country anyway.

Why not buy from bookdepository.com ? They even have free shipping if I remember correctly.

Honest question - I don't buy books often.

As mentioned by others, Amazon owns them. I used to use them until I found out about that, then switched to https://blackwells.co.uk/ and https://wordery.com which are usually pretty close price-wise and also offer free shipping.

Amazon owns bookdepository

I don't know it, I live in Europe, not sure of this is a thing here

I work at Book Depository. We ship to almost every country in the world, and certainly to every country in Europe.

I've ordered from them many times to Hungary, it works well.

To be fair, this might not be Amazon's fault, it could have happened with any online booksellers, because ultimately the publisher is at fault. For example, Oxford University Press used to be renowned for the quality of its printing and binding, but it has quietly moved many titles to very shoddy digital printing with misaligned pages and a glued binding that fails instantly, and online you just can't be sure whether you'll get a quality book from an earlier print run, or the new crap. Even the ISBN might be the same.

Weird however that it happens so often with Amazon (with books from different publishers) while it never happened to me when using more local online booksellers, where I was essentially buying the same kind of books.

I noticed the same thing with other stuff from Amazon. E.g. 3 of the Amazon basic HDMI cables I ordered didn't work. Ordered similarly priced ones at a local retailer and they worked like a charm - all of them.

I am not the only person who noticed that Amazon's quality has dropped in recent years.

Edit: one thing I forgot to mention: one of the faulty books was also clearly used, there was even a coffee (?) stain inside. This is not something that happens because the publisher has bad quality control.

Some OUP books look like they were printed on a laser printer from 1988 now. I think they’re doing print-on-demand for some titles. You expect better for a $40 paperback.

Amazon has been known to ship counterfeit books.

Don't forget the usually horrible wrapping job. I've received a bunch of damaged books because they couldn't be bothered to wrap the book up. In one case, it was the only copy left I could find anywhere and I was stuck with it.

These days (unless there's absolutely no other option), the only books I buy from Amazon are audio books.

Same here, binding off, print colors off, or warped paper and etc. I've been assuming they're fakes.

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