Kindle edition of Classic Computer Science Problems in Python is unauthorized | Hacker News Reader

Kindle edition of Classic Computer Science Problems in Python is unauthorized

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170 pointsWoodenChair79 comments

Amazon is getting overrun by scams. They're behind eBay and Aliexpress at this point.

I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff.

There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams.

Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control, their brand value will go to nothing.

Aliexpress is interesting. They actually have a pretty developed dispute model with a number of stages. Works "reasonably".

Amazon though - the scam level / trash level is just ridiculous.

The other thing - there are a TON of products that are the same, with only the brand / label different. I just did a search for fans, and 5 or 6 models had the EXACT same shape, look, everything, only difference was the name of the "company" making them. Not so useful when you are browsing around to have to wade through so much similar schlock, and weird they can't use AI to add a bit of differentiation.

I think they just don't really care at this point, and it's working for them sort of. I've switched a bunch of recent purchasing to home depot though - shipment speeds have been fine and more importantly accurate. I think some of the old school players may (finally) be catching on to what made amazon popular.

there are a TON of products that are the same, with only the brand / label different

This is nothing new, and not unique to Amazon.

Some factory is churning out fans. They sell a bunch of them to different retailers in different regions with just the packaging altered.

In the old days the rebranded fans would go to Caldor's and Playtogs, and K-Mart, and Ben Franklin, and a dozen other chains. But also in the old days, the chains had very little geographic overlap, so nobody noticed or cared.

Now all of those "retailers" are virtual. And they're all selling in the same place, Amazon. The result is that you see all these identical fans with just the branding altered, and it feels like more of a scam than it really is.

The same thing also happens in ways that are harder to detect in other markets like wine. See https://priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine:

> In this range, brands can dramatically affect price. The same wine in two differently branded bottles can have very different costs, as shown by the prices offered by negociants such as Cameron Hughes:

> “Hughes signs confidentiality agreements that preserve a winery’s anonymity. After all, a producer of a $40 Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon doesn’t want his customers to know they can get a nearly identical wine from Hughes for $25. Yet the winery might need to move out surplus inventory, generate cash flow or make full use of capacity, a win-win-win situation for the producers, consumers and Hughes.”

More to the point with ebooks: under how many circumstances would you have multiple editions from multiple publishers? From some of the comments below, Amazon clearly knows that they are the same book yet are letting them be published without question. Perhaps they should flag ebooks and verify the rights outside of those circumstances. It may be a lot of work at first, but I doubt that there would be as many attempted scams once Amazon starts weeding them out.

(The reasons I can think of for different publishers are: public domain books, titles that have been in publication long enough for contracts to run out, and editions that are restricted by region._)

Reading https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/, it seems having lots of scammy, poorly formatted copied content isn’t a recent problem. What may be new is that this takes copyrighted material.

> I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff.

That would be great, but I also think we need to consider if these business have developed enough to a point where they require more thorough regulation by the government.

> There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams.

Well, absent any external force like government regulation this is true. It's also why I don't trust any large company to regulate themselves or their own markets appropriately; the distribution simply doesn't allow for outcomes that are strictly consumer focused.

> Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control

How many times in history has a retail giant been able to exert this control themselves?

I tried to buy some higher end digital calipers last week and almost all the top reviews are instructions on how to tell if they are fakes or not. And the reviews from people getting fakes are giving the item one star which goes against the actual item’s rating.

I’ve given up on buying anything like that from Amazon for exactly this reason. I’d rather go through e.g. MSC and know I’m getting what I want the first time.

Specialty suppliers sell to a relatively small market of pros and can’t afford to burn them. You often pay more, but you get a better experience.

It’s like buying from Digikey vs Radio Shack.

That said, you can usually do a lot better on price than Grainger, who seem to mostly want larger accounts and don’t give good prices to the accountless.

Other good online suppliers I’ve used:

Uline

McMaster-Carr

Router bit world

Highland woodworking

Infinity cutting tools

Rexel

Locally, you probably have suppliers for some of these industries that do principally brick and mortar sales and have a limited online presence.

Buying on eBay is fine but selling on eBay feels like high risk of running into scammers where you can end up eating the loss every time since ultimately eBay/PayPal sides with scammer (because they can do chargebacks). There is no protection that is helpful here for sellers.

I'm sure they're watching this closely. But for now, scams are still more profitable for them than cracking down on those scams. A moderate amount of impact to brand value is always acceptable to near-monopolies.

Amazon has always been forward-thinking, and they ran at a loss for decades to build up a trillion dollar business. I really don't think short-term thinking is what's causing them to tear it down right now.

I have no insider information, but I rather suspect that either:

1) it either got out-of-control to where it would cost billions of dollars to address

2) that there's some organizational dysfunction to where they're not competent to address it.

Or something similar. Those sorts of problems are tough. Cultures, incentive structures, and organizational design issues are slower and harder to resolve than just about anything else, and the theory for how to fix them is not well-developed. Sometimes you try something, and it crashes-and-burns.

OP did not say it is a short term plan. Amazon could very well be accepting some amount of bad press around this if profits keep increasing.

They aren't a near monopoly though. They have about 49% of the eCommerce market.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...

It's gone up since I last checked, but that's not a monopoly. They're just the most consolidated block.

You can downvote but 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of ecomm is not anywhere close to a classical monopoly.

Why focus so much on the word? People reach for one of the few common words we have for “badly-behaved corporation” to express their criticism of Amazon practices, not by hawkishly watching market share graphs until one line gets too high. Maybe there is a better word, but the problems people experience are still there and are still real.

Words have power and you should try to be precise with them, monopoly doesn't mean badly behaved corporation and you'll find I disagree with the thought that Amazon is a badly behaving corporation in any case.

Monopoly implies you being forced to use their services with no such alternative and having negative consequences from that as a consumer. I order from many alternatives on the regular.

Monopolies have consequences under US law, not liking a companies practices is A. A matter of personal interpretation and B. Not nearly enough to trigger the consequences from the US's actual laws.

> Why focus so much on the word?

The word in particular has special connotations in US law.

The people that like the service amazon provides probably don't want that designation applied to amazon, since there's a chance the company could be broken up at that point.

I don't like it because calling a non monopoly a monopoly has potentially broader implications for other companies not just Amazon, I don't like the dominoes the shift to this thinking implies.

Fair, I didn't cover it because dragging in the rest of the amazon scale companies seems like it would have cluttered the point I was trying to make.

But your point is relevant, this has implications for many companies outside of just amazon.

The premise of the comment is that monopolies can ignore negative reputation because there's no alternative. But that's not true for badly behaved corporations in general.

Yes, this. All the stuff about how because they commingle inventory[1] Amazon also can't control scams on physical products even if it says "sold by Amazon" means I simply won't buy anything important on Amazon anymore.

I recently ordered two smoke detectors for my house, but, you know, I'd like smoke detectors to be products that are actually legitimate and by a company with a reputation to maintain rather than a knock-off that will get me killed. So I ordered it from walmart instead.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ifytxk/ysk_t...

This has become a really serious problem buying any sort of Kindle book these days. I got very tired of the OCR-created classic books that are sold with poor formatting, spelling errors and sometimes even remnants of the conversion process left in the text, so I always really carefully search for specific publishers, for instance "Jane Austen Sanditon Penguin English Library" (or similar). But even here all the reviews for the tens of different editions are simply mingled together - including people complaining about torn paperback covers, and random editions that are stolen from Project Gutenberg and sold for profit on Amazon, as well as some that are simply gibberish and seem to have been run through Google-translate. That particular edition above even links to the wrong item from the search.

So sad that Amazon don't even care about their Kindle book inventory any longer: this is an area where they could easily guarantee authenticity and quality - if they could give a shit.

> But even here all the reviews for the tens of different editions are simply mingled together

This isn't just books. There are product pages that cover multiple different models with all the reviews and ratings mashed together, even though the models have essentially nothing to do with each other. Like different sizes of Samsung phone but the different sizes have entirely different motherboards/screen techs/cpus/memory.

For many products there is a way to separate out the reviews, although it is not obvious how to do it:

Click the "nnn customer ratings" to get to the review section.

In the barchart on the left, click any of the "n star" or "nn%" links.

Above the reviews will be a row of dropdown lists, which may include "All formats" or "All styles" or the like. There you can select the individual product variation. You can also change the "n star only" to "All stars" to get all the reviews for that variation.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for the book being discussed here.

I just checked a dozen books, from the ones Amazon recommends for me, from their best sellers, and in some randomly chosen categories, and didn't run across any that allowed format filtering.

Also, I distinctly recall I used to see reviews where between the reviewers name and their review, Amazon added a note saying what format the review was for. I'm not seeing that anymore, either.

Interesting, I do still see the filter choices for other products, and I thought I used to see them for books.

Maybe they stopped doing it for books? (Other filters are still there, but not filtering by edition.)

To be fair, it seems like a tough problem to solve generally: what is two variants of one product versus separate products is not well defined. Even if you only have two different colors of the same product, a review might apply regardless of color or only to the one color, or even a mix of both ("2 stars, the ink in this pen smudges too easily and the blue is a light blue not a dark blue")

Part of the problem is that we're using reviews for multiple purposes:

Amazon mostly seems to want reviews to be for a type of product and is fine merging reviews from any seller claiming to sell that product because at least then all the reviews will be in the same place. This is still subject to the problem you're describing (how broadly should different parts of a single review apply).

That isn't the whole story though. For a lot of products people already know exactly what they want and are using reviews to figure out if the seller is able to provide it without selling a counterfeit, without shipping it 2 months late for 2-day shipping, without selling a used model as new, etc.... This still suffers from a granularity problem (does the seller generally do a good job and just not know how to package N64 controllers), but that granularity isn't as severe of an issue as with arbitrary products.

Check out Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org. I started the project in large part because of Amazon's lack of interest in quality control for their books. Our catalog is still smaller compared to Gutenberg but the project has been around for ~5 years and is stable and growing.

Big fan of Standard Ebooks here since the beginning. Thanks for doing what you do and keep iterating. You should because I see no signs that Amazon is going to address ebook QC.

Do you accept donations?

Not at the moment, but we're working on it :)

I got very tired of the OCR-created classic books that are sold with poor formatting, spelling errors and sometimes even remnants of the conversion process left in the text

I got so tired of it that I gave up on e-books, and only get my books in dead tree form now. And not from Amazon, but from real book stores and libraries that pull what I want from their shelves.

While I can no longer get my books in 11 seconds, or "free next day shipping," I know that I'm getting what I paid for, and supporting people who need support.

>random editions that are stolen from Project Gutenberg and sold for profit on Amazon,

Most of what is on Project Gutenberg is public domain so it's not being "stolen." If it's a simple copy and paste with no added value and it's being sold, that's a bit slimy but it's not stealing.

If you are looking for classic books why don't you go to Project Guttenberg? They have many (most?) classic books in many different formats.

I'm not sure that a publisher should still be getting money out of a work that was published over 100 years ago.

This is just a core component of Amazon's business model which can best be characterized as "intentional oversight", where little effort is made against illegitimate users and scenarios if they bring in revenue for them. It has been true for a very long time in many different scenarios, including physical piracy and (via hearsay) lax credit card validation policies.

> lax credit card validation policies

However, if you try to pay through a bank account (at least in Germany), it's an utter pain. Same with Maestro debit cards...

I tried this the other day since amazon.de kept bugging me about it. But what's the point. Like is it cheaper for Amazon than Mastercard?

If I pay with my mastercard I get a notification instantly and the money disappears. With SEPA-Lastschrift it takes ages and makes budgeting difficult.

That’s because you have consumer protection laws putting Amazon on the hook if that use was unauthorized.

>and (via hearsay) lax credit card validation policies.

Is that really a problem? AFAIK in card not present transactions (aka. buying stuff online), the merchant is eating the cost of chargebacks.

I dont know enough to confidently comment, but at the time the approach was clearly distinct from everyone else in the market

This sucks:

"It's crazy that @Amazon has allowed this. There is literally a poorly formatted pirated version of my book on the Amazon Kindle store accumulating 1 and 2 star reviews for its poor formatting that count against all editions."

I enjoyed the book (paper copy, purchased from Manning), so this prompted me to leave an official review.

Thank you for your support!

How does this happen though? Like, policing counterfeit physical products in an environment full of third-party sellers is actual work, because you have to somehow figure out how to inspect or filter a bunch of actual things from many, many, people.

By contrast, there aren't that many sizeable publishing houses in the world. Manning obviously isn't huge, but they aren't tiny either. They've been around for over 25 years, they have hundreds of titles---they're at least a medium-sized, serious, commercial press. And Amazon has been in the book industry for forever.

So: how hard would it really be to maintain a list of authorized agents for serious, commercial presses, and not sell e-books for works currently in print from those presses, unless the person selling them is one of those agents, or can prove that the e-book is authorized/in the public domain? This does not seem hard at all. Like, not even a little bit. Hell, I'd go so far as to call it easy.

For anybody who would like to sample this interesting sounding book, there appears to be substantial preview contents available on the publisher's site with a nice audio version as well.

I don't know the limitations; it appears to be constrained by viewport access only (ie. you can read it all without signing in but not offline; it scrambles text when you scroll).

Example: https://livebook.manning.com/book/classic-computer-science-p...

Nice presentation work by Manning/Livebook.

Copyright infringement aside, I always tell people that the Kindle ecosystem (from their crappy who-cares approach to their store catalog, to the crappy software in their Kindle products) is a complete disaster. Shoddy formatting is the norm and is only encouraged by the Kindle's shoddy renderer and file format.

Amazon may have kickstarted the ereading device boom, but Kindles surely don't deserve to be as popular as they are any more, especially with a tech-savvy crowd like HN. Other alternatives exist that are much, much better. Anyone who cares about books at all should purchase a device that has native epub support and a good epub renderer. (I.e., not Adobe Digital Editions.) Kobo is a very good option that ticks those boxes, though other alternatives exist. The native iOS Books app on iPad is probably the top tier of native epub renderers though that's obviously not an eink option.

Can second Kobo being good & much better than Kindle. One issue I have with them though is that their recent e-reader models have ~8 GB internal storage and no way to expand that, while older models had a normal micro SD slot.

Might not be a big problem for text only books, but for picture heavy content and complex PDFs its not a lot of space at all. I guess it's to push people to use their store more as they can easily re-download stuff from there.

Is it possible to satisfy these criteria with non-Kindle ebook options?

* Good book selection, including more obscure and older books.

* Highlighting and notes automatically get backed up somewhere off-device.

* Paperwhite-sized backlit e-ink device.

I would really love to move off Kindle but AFAIK nothing else can satisfy these yet.

Kobo. I have a Kobo Aura One from several years ago that does all of that. Book selection in their store is subjective but you can side-load any epub file very easily.

The Kobo Aura One seems discontinued. They have a Kobo Nia, but it looks seems terrible (just like the entry-level Kindle). The Kobo Clara is $120 [0], so that's the one going up against the Paperwhite.

I'm ashamed to admit I've never considered using a Kobo, but looking into it, damn. The Kobo's lighting color is adjustable, so no more of that garish blue light. And it supports ePUB files natively. The bezel seems a lot thinner. The only feature it's lacking is it isn't waterproof.

Meanwhile, the Kobo Libra H2O is $170, and is waterproof, has page-turn buttons, and a larger screen.

Since I usually strip DRM (getting harder to do), and even sometimes edit eBooks to strip out the shite publishers add to it (like reading samples for other books, I mean WTF), the ePUB support would be extremely useful.

[0] https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-...

Any other alternatives you'd recommend?

I even saw somewhere an article on topic "how to make money duplicating books for Kindle". Was presented like it's something legitimate.

My 5 cents - reading a books on CS topics requires a lot of notes making and working with this notes on kidnle is the worst.

Awesome, another scam to worry about on Kindle. Kindle is already worthless for browsing technical books, anyway. So many of the titles on there tend to be low-effort books that get higher placing than legitimate titles. The rest of Amazon is fraught with scams. For example, I will never ever purchase cologne, hair, or skincare products from Amazon because there are so many fakes. Browse some of the reviews from people that experience things like hair falling out or chemical burns, and then they find out they received a bootleg product even when they use "Ships from Amazon." Amazon is getting increasingly useless for shopping.

> There is literally a poorly formatted pirated version of my book on the Amazon Kindle store accumulating 1 and 2 star reviews for its poor formatting that count against all editions.

So not only do they commingle physical items so you never know what you get. They also allow other people's products to affect your rating.

That struck me as especially egregious; even if the e-book-version was legitimate, why on earth would anyone think that merging these reviews is a good idea?

Some tech books are, in my opinion, terrible for e-book without adjustments and vice versa (e.g., description on left page and corresponding picture on right page might work quite well in a paper book but not in an ebook where you see only one page at a time); why would these ever be merged?

Is this a normal thing on Amazon? Speaking as someone who never ordered anything from Amazon as it barely services my country

I don't work at Amazon, but worked at a similar (European, national) retailer:

You really have to walk the line between ratings-per-SKU and aggregate ratings sometimes.

In an ideal world, the reading experience of a Kindle book is the same as the physical book. So someone might argue that ratings should be aggregated across all version of the product. Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance.

Similarly, do you really want people to leave ratings on a black shirt in size L, and that rating not apply to all sizes and colors?

I assume someone at Amazon thinks about this, and the defaults (fashion => merge, books => merge, electronics => donotmerge) etc. do OK until complaints come in. There's no profit in not being heavy-handed.

I expect a review of a book to be a review of the book. The contents of the book are only one aspect of the book. The digital or physical form of the book is no less important to me when I am looking to buy the book, particularly when the digital or physical form of the book might very well be irredeemable trash (rendering the quality of the contents irrelevant.)

> Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance.

I would expect different ratings, because when you buy a book it is not just the content you are buying. The reason people look at reviews is to decide whether or not to buy, and the physical quality of the book is important for that.

If the hardback is fine but the paperback has pages out of order and that fall out when you turn them, then people who bought the paperback are going to (quite justifiably) be leaving reviews with the lowest rating possible. This doesn't help me at all when I'm considering buying the hardback.

Well, people can explain their low ratings. "A real page turner but the paperback printing and binding were awful." The problem is that, if you rate at the SKU level, you now have different reviews for every size and color of shirt. "The green color isn't at all like what was on the product page."

The reality is that for most books (pretty much all fiction, most trade paperbacks without a lot of illustrations/code/etc.), Kindle format is just fine even on a e-paper reader.

> "The green color isn't at all like what was on the product page."

That's a valuable review though; if a green shirt is not as advertised I want to know that before I buy it.

Yes, but it's pretty much as valuable lumped in with the other shirt reviews whereas if you split out reviews for each individual SKU, many of the items will end up not having reviews at all.

Amazon could simply have aggregated star totals and reviews, with the ability to select narrower subsets.

If I'm looking at a book and worried about quality differences between formats I could ask ask for just reviews from verified paperback purchasers, then from verified hardback purchasers, and then from verified Kindle purchasers.

They already allow filtering by verified purchasers. Just add the format filtering, and when viewing through filters show the aggregate star stats for the resulting reviews.

This would be close to trivial for them to do and greatly increase the usefulness of reviews with no effect on people who are OK with the current aggregate approach.

If a particular variation has no review, I want to know that before I buy it. What good is a bunch of 5 star reviews for a red shirt if the lime green shirt I want to buy is actually the color of baby shit?

> In an ideal world, the reading experience of a Kindle book is the same as the physical book. So someone might argue that ratings should be aggregated across all version of the product. Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance.

Right, the issue though is that there is a much larger gulf between the eBook and print book than there is between the paperback and hardcover. And the delivery mechanism can greatly affect your enjoyment of the book. It's about more than just appearance. Source code in particular, does not often work well on a Kindle's tiny screen.

Although maybe it does if you read it on a full-size tablet. In general, I mostly avoid buying books I know aren't 95% text in Kindle format unless they're very cheap or are from a known publisher for things like guidebooks. They can work well but it's definitely hit or miss. (I also just don't like ebooks for certain types of references where I want to stick post-its etc.)

I personally fully agree!

But I imagine a PM at Amazon was presented with the question "Should ratings of all versions of books be merged?".

Unless they really really cared (or personally had experienced dramatic differences between versions of books before), they probably said "Yeah sure".

(I'm also biased a bit in that I assume that implementing this more fine-grained would cost more than $0).

It seems like there's room for compromise. You could simply assign a lower weight to reviews for a different size/format. Or you could split ratings entirely if (and only if) the review averages are significantly different.

To play devil's advocate, they should be merged because they're mostly the same product. If I'm contemplating buying a paperback novel, I might read criticism from reviewers who only had the hardback edition. Maybe occasionally this will make me buy some books with poor-quality printing and binding, but mostly I'm interested in the content of the book. And if I did care about the presentation, I might be better off reading reviews for different paperback books by the same publisher.

In the same way, an e-book mostly has the same content as its paper source, and most of the time the publication process will be of an acceptable quality and what I care about is the content.

These assumptions all break down once other publishers enter the market though. If the work is public domain, then finding reviews of the general content is likely much easier and less useful than a review of how this edition has been put together.

From the earliest days, Amazon apparently made the decision not to separate reviews of content from reviews of the delivery of that content, e.g. award-winning films with a poorly-made DVD.

And, yes, it can be an issue with Kindle. A lot of books with illustrations, sidebars, footnotes, etc. (i.e. not simply free-flowing text) get designed for print and are sometimes just automatically converted to ebooks without much care. It's a bit of a dice roll.

I once bought a Kindle version of a book that was originally published before Kindle existed, and the publisher never produced an ebook version. I bought the Kindle version because the print version was very hard to find, and the copies available were outrageously expensive, in some cases 10 times the original price of the hardcopy book. The Kindle version, which I assumed at the time had been automatically produced by Amazon, was horrible, completely unreadable. I've never bought another Kindle version of an older textbook.

You used to be able to at least hit the link to see all reviews. The all reviews filtering options included one to filter by format. This helped a lot.

I don't see that anymore.

Also, on the reviews themselves it used to state what format a given review was for. I don't see that anymore either.

So...it looks like Amazon deliberately decided to make it harder to tell if the Kindle edition is good or not.

Review filtering is still available for many products, see my note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24400210 for how to get there.

Unfortunately it's not available for this book. (You can filter by star rating but not by edition.)

I've been purchasing pc parts from ebay and honestly I've found it at least as reliable and with better prices to boot.

How is Amazon allowed to advertise Kindle so much beside every book on the website? Isn't it anti competitive?

Whenever you click on a book, it defaults to the Kindle version. When you change it to the paperback edition, you are faced with banners on all 4 sides saying 'Kindle is good, fast and easy', etc etc

Probably but you're on their site at this stage, buying from them. Yes, they are pushing you to a product that (I assume) has a margin higher profit margin, but this is not like a neutral product comparison site.

Sounds about like the physical products on Amazon these days.

This. I have to be so careful about making sure who it is that is the actual vendor. Amazon used to clearly state that a product was "sold and fulfilled by amazon" but I don't see that anymore.

I've read that Amazon warehouses mix every vendor's products with the same UPC code into the same box. If that's true, then it's pot luck whether you receive a legitimate or fake product.

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