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Comment by f311a | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by release date.

I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients.

Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.

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Affects older books too. I've found books that were very obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears, missing pages and the odd pencil lines.

https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp

https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp

https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp

Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off.

Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.

I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then returning them since they clearly don't match the expected result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so they would stop doing this sort of scam.

Unfortunately I doubt it. If they are just printing on-demand low-quality books it seems they’d not be badly hurt as their variable costs are cheap paper and cheap ink.

If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of a Legends of Stuxnet, then you’d get somewhere.

Or if you figured out their business and determined if they sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop buying, and then do the mass return.

yeah I saw that too. They take the books from archive.org, it’s public domains books.

It’s essentially legal, and I think it’s not that scammy honestly. People want these books on paper, nobody prints them anymore or has the texts.

edit: I also saw some people selling the OCR from these books, which is far worse. You need to guess the original, especially if it has some latin/german inside English.

I honestly think it would be fine if they were a bit more clear about what you're buying. As it is, you're typically getting nearly no information beyond the title and the publisher.

Making available rare out of print books is a noble goal.

> I don't understand why they don't fix this problem.

Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.

That's exactly it, it doesn't hurt them enough that the products they sell are low quality. For every one person that returns a book (which costs Amazon money), there's a dozen that just won't bother, it's not worth the hassle for them.

But there are other platforms out there (especially for books) that people will prefer if they make it easier to find high-quality content. I’m with the poster you replied to; it would make sense for Amazon to go after these fake products.

It's a particularly bad problem for books, but it's a problem for every product category. Unless Amazon sees people abandoning them in large numbers (personally, I haven't ordered from them in years) they're not going to change.

Going into full tinfoil hat territory: I wonder whether those products are the equivalent of the 'deliberate' spelling and grammatical errors we're all told end up in spam emails to pre-filter out people who probably won't fall for the scam. Amazon doesn't want customers who care about quality, because they leave bad reviews and have a higher return rate.

Amazon is full of low-effort products in every category. If you search for certain consumer goods you'll get several different brand names for the same white-label product, for instance. And lots of people buy them! It's not just an easily-ignored spam problem…

I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through unfair competition.

It is the same problem with Facebook: does Mark Zuckerberg leave FB before it crashes (or accepts that The Metaverse is a complete failure).

Does Jeff Bezos change direction and drop the "everything store" strategy by realizing that most of everything is trash and he is destroying the Amazon brand?

To misquote him: your garbage is my opportunity.

He enables competition to use brands as a strategy: we make sure everything we sell is the best. If you shop at our place, you will not be wasting your time.

> the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.

Amazon pays users who publish hundreds of reviews. It gives Amazon credibility to other users.

They don't give a shit as long as it's moving volume.

Tools on amazon have same problem, so many fakes, they get reported and company just pops up with different name.

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