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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

I see Amazon affiliate links but zero disclosure that the author is earning a commission from these recommendations.

Affiliate links aren't a problem in themselves, but it's misleading and unethical to recommend a product without disclosing your financial incentives to the reader.

If you're in the US, this is a violation of the FTC Act.[0] Outside the US, Amazon still requires you to disclose that they're sponsoring your reviews. [1]

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

[1] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GHQNZAU...

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Also, amazon sells lots of counterfeit books now, so the author of the site makes money off these books but the people that actually write the books probably don't:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287936

- and just reading the reviews on the books of everyone saying they are getting counterfeit books.

The author could link to a book seller that actually sells the real book, but then I guess they wouldn't get their kickback.

(updated post to appease people that would rather get next day shipping than support the authors of the books.)

> amazon only sells counterfeit books anymore

This statement is (obviously) false as 99.9+% of all books sold on Amazon are authentic. Yes, Amazon should do even more to combat counterfeit everything but inflammatory, false comments are not productive.

Every Tech book I've looked at in the past few month has reviews of people showing their counterfeit books they have received. I'm not sure why you are defending Amazon's practice of letting this go on.

The first book on that list has comments showing off the counterfeit book that the people have gotten!

Reviews on Clean code: This books is a fake. Don't buy it. Look at the images I posted.

Reviews On Mythical Man: ordered new book, got something that was used and marked up and Great book, terrible terrible print and binding quality (which I assume is just a counterfeit)

Reviews On Algorithms: Beware of counterfeits; do not buy from Amazon!

I'm not going through the entire list, but most of the tech books are all fakes.

I've bought several tech books in the past month such as Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasak, none were fake. I think you'd get less push back if your rephrased the original post as more of a warning that books ordered may be fake.

Amazon has a serious counterfeiting problem. They need to clean house.

i agree with disclosure on a moral/ethical basis, but cynically, how exactly is the FTC Act meant to be enforced? what is the point of making laws that cannot be enforced?

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