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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to take this opportunity to grind my personal axe: Amazon is extremely lazy about shipping books, throwing them into lightly-padded envelopes. Books shipped from Amazon usually arrive with at least minor cosmetic damage and sometimes much worse. For me this is reason enough to avoid buying books on Amazon.

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I recently ordered an illustrated novel with a rather heavy paperweight - Amazon shipped it in weakly padded envelopes and the corners were banged up. I even bothered to contact their customer service to ship it with better packaging, to no avail on the replacement item.

I then ordered 10 of the damn things, to see what the packaging would do. 4 came in one box, 3 came in another, and 3 came in individual poorly padded envelopes. The ones in boxes had insufficiently inflated plastic bags, and only 2 books out the entire 12 ordered (original, replacement, and the 10) were what Amazon defines as 'New' upon arrival, though all were shipped as 'New'.

Definitely a frustrating experience.

Edit: I returned all but the one showing the least damage, and received a full refund after some time.

You should have taken pictures and made a blog post out of it.

Props for going through the hassle. How bad does Amazonneed to get before the costs of negligence outweigh doing it right the first time? I would think there are dozens of actuaries doing the math, maybe I'm giving bezo too much credit though.

No one at Amazon is listening.

Keep in mind the following scenario: if all books were packed to ensure no possible damage, then you would see another set of posts lamenting how wasteful amazon is with packaging.

As a counter anecdote, in my case, all books get delivered in good enough condition where I don't feel the need to remark on it.

At amazon's scale, damned if you do/damned if you don't becomes a certainty.

They do the same thing with vinyl records. I opted to roll with Amazon because I was impatient and wanted it soon, even though I'd rather have given my money to an actual record shop. Sure enough, they packed the record like they pack everything else - in a box that's too big and not specifically made for the product, with a couple of InstaPak air sleeves; it was almost comical. Lots of cosmetic damage on the record sleeve, unfortunately. My immediate thought upon opening it was, "Of course."

Record shops or folk on Discogs will always ship them in boxes specifically made for records, and (knock on wood) I'd never received a damage record in the post until that point and haven't since.

Never again will I buy vinyl through them.

I’ve had a really good experience with shipping on Discogs. Better then what you get buying directly from the artist (though I do try to do so when possible). I’ve bought from record stores domestically and overseas. Would recommend.

I ordered an $80 art book from Amazon. Had to return the first two they sent me, they were so damaged. No protection at all, just loose in a box. Amazon used to mount books to a piece of cardboard and shrinkwrap it together. They must have calculated that most people don’t care and it’s cheaper to damage books with a certain probability. As a book-lover I’m offended by all the waste.

In the UK they still deliver single books with wrap around cardboard cover - seems to work fine. Never had a problem. Could be a size issue.

I wouldn't call it laziness but money-driven apathy. They probably tell the warehouse packers to use envelopes for all non-fragile items. As long as the cost of returns is less than the cost of hiring more packers to keep up, Amazon will do things this way.

And, from my experience as a warehouse order packer, the quotas are insane. I'm cautious with other people's stuff, so it wasn't long before they reassigned me. Commercial bulk buyers got better treatment.

I've had a run of damage to books, but from what looks like printing ... for what I suspect are actually fakes.

The binding is a bit off, or pages just didn't print right / are malformed, or strange sort of "weathering" like effects over time, and etc.

I've definitely received counterfeit books from Amazon. I bought two volumes in a set of George Orwell essays and the difference in quality between the genuine one and the fake one was absurd. The real volume was a high quality trade paperback and the fake was a low-quality scan of the book printed on extremely cheap paper, binding stiff and hard to open. I emailed the publisher to let them know it was happening and never heard back.

Same here. I am weirdly attached to my books and having an ugly crease in the cover of a paperback still bugs me when I look at it years later.

I 100% share the frustration with carelessly damaged books from Amazon and don't disagree with your comment, but just want to say it's not Jeff Bezos or "Amazon" doing this to your shipment.

It's underpaid, overworked and (these days) health-endangered warehouse workers pushed beyond their limits by crazy quotas and efficiency measurements trying avoid losing their jobs.

[Well, I guess I should say it is Bezos/Amazon, but you know what I mean.]

They do the same to Lego, which sucks because it actually damages the resale value for collectors.

Oddly, Lego damages their own stuff too, no way to guarantee uncrushed boxes I guess.

I order meat from The Great British Meat Company and my meat arrives 2 days later, still refrigerated, in a hard polystyrene case packed in with still frozen ice cube bags. It costs a little more to deliver, but it arrives upright and in a perfect condition at 3 degrees Celsius (~38f).

Its ridiculous that something of regular shape, in a regular box, is so difficult not to damage in transit especially from a company like Lego who exist purely on the sentiment parents and children have towards their brand.

Those meat packages end up getting very different handling, because of the dry ice that's used to keep them cold. It's necessary to keep a careful track of the dry ice and know how much of it you're loading into a container, in order to avoid asphyxiating your colleagues. Most packages are just tossed along as quickly as possible, because there's a tight schedule to keep. But you have to temporarily slow way down when a package containing dry ice comes down the belt.

It's a little bit like that photographer's trick of packing a starter pistol with your camera equipment when flying, in order to ensure that the baggage crew is extra careful with your stuff.

Source: I used to schlep packages at a UPS hub.

Just to clarify: the meat packages I ordered didn't use any dry ice. They provide two (standard) ice packs, one which is placed beneath the meat and one which is placed above the meat.

Because the polystyrene is so thick and they send so much ice, the ice was still fully frozen when I received it 42 hours after my order.

We've actually kept the polystyrene box and ice packs to reuse for picnic days and things like that.

Some have been over-packed - especially from third party bookstores. But new books from amazon, are hit or miss, sometimes being thrown in with non-book items. (think of packing the eggs with the hammers)

To me this is preferable to putting it in a large cardboard box with bubble wrap like they seem to do for even tiny but durable products like finger nail clippers. It’s much less of a waste and I don’t mind if a book is slightly creased.

Powell's (for example) have a good alternative, they stack several books on a piece of cardboard the size of the box's bottom, then shrink-wrap the books to the cardboard. The books can't slide around, and can't move much. I've never had any arrive damaged (unlike AMZN).

The energy used by re-shipping damaged goods must outweight cardboard waste?

THe past few years I have had books shipped more securely by 3rd party sellers than direct from Amazon.

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