Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook

wandering.shop

342 pointsKye182 comments

Zilla here (one of the Sad Bastard Cookbook authors). Thanks so much for your support ... I'm lowkey dropping "front page of Hacker News" when I talk to Amazon Service reps now, in the vague hope they have any power to actually help me. I think I've reached at least one real person, but in the days of AI voice chat, who can tell?

Many of you asked why we use Amazon as the exclusive printer/distributor of the print edition. Variations of this happened to basically every self-pub author I've met, so why didn't I use another platform?

1) Reach. As Ma8ee pointed out, there's literally dozens of people buying books online but not on Amazon. If I want readers to find it, I need to be on Amazon. Bonus, one of the most important controlling factors in new people finding your book is whether the Amazon promo algorithim suggests the book to them, so any sale off Amazon doesn't contribute to building an avalanche. The game's rigged, but it's the only game in town.

2) Money/quality. Last time I checked (few years back, things might have changed), Draft2Digital print books were bad quality. Ingram print books are decent quality but their calculation for printing fees and royalties means they usually don't pay out at nearly the same rate. I've not compared directly for the Cookbook, but for Instant Classic, it's the difference between making a couple dollars or a couple cents. We did it for Instant Classic as a service for people who despise Amazon, but the royalties from the Cookbook are a substantial factor in "eating" and "making rent" for one of the Cookbook team, so there's a limit to how much I want to give away the print edition of the Cookbook. Especially if "giving it away" involves the reader paying Ingram, just not us. If anyone knows a print-on-demand distributor who pays out enough in royalties for authors to make money, please respond to this.

3) Distribution. We're small fry self-pub, without a big publishing house behind us. I've looked around for places which will take us on self-pub books and distribute them, and the options are pretty limited. I'm convinced we'd sell in brick-and-mortar stores, but that's typically not an option for self-pub unless you approach the owner of an independent bookshop on an individual basis. (We approached a couple proper distributors who accept query letters from non-traditionally published books, but they focused on specific genres and we weren't the right fit.) Basically, if you're not traditionally published, you're looking at Amazon, Ingram, or Draft2Digital to print and distribute your books. If anyone knows of other printer/distributors which take self-pub books, PLEASE tell me.

ETA: people are informing me that Ingram can make money, and that Lulu exists. I am investigating.

I've had good luck with Lulu. My experience was short-runs. I sometimes like to make custom notebooks for myself and friends. But the quality was good. Lulu will print spiral fold flat editions. Might come in handy for a cookbook.

I've also had good luck with Blurb. They do high quality photobooks. Which isn't what you're selling, but I'm mentioning them because they will offer your book for sale, print-on-demand, via their site. And wouldn't be surprised if they have a way of selling via Amazon. They wouldn't be a bad choice if you wanted to sell a $50+ coffee table edition of your cookbook. Or a bit lower for a paperback edition.

Oh thank you, I'll look into that!

I'll second both LuLu and Blurb for photo books though it's been quite a while since I used either. (I've usually used Blurb but I did go with LuLu once or twice for reasons I forget.)

Indie publisher here. Sorry to hear about this. Among the numerous frustrations that publishers and sellers report when dealing with Amazon, automated lockouts are near the top of the list. Inability to get a clear explanation or knowledgeable human support are close behind.

I always tell other publishers that Amazon's seller tech is like a rickety roller coaster with lots of kludged together components - built to go fast, but with lots of loose bits that rattle and sometimes cause the system to fail. Technology glitches, bad UI design, poor communication, and complex policy requirements lead to a huge support burden. Even if you can get a good Amazon support agent, they are not always able to diagnose certain problems, let alone provide a fix.

The parts of the company facing small publishers and third-party sellers is extremely siloed, which makes things even worse for sellers trying to get through complex issues touching multiple services. Reporting something like "I can't get Amazon Advertising to connect with my KDP account" can lead to runarounds that require multiple tickets or are never solved.

Regarding distribution: I don't use a distributor owing to the lead time required and the huge commissions involved, but a few I know work with IPG (https://www.ipgbook.com/). If you have a track record of sales, that can open the door to distribution and potentially help get through the Amazon problems you are experiencing as they have direct contacts with back-end Amazon staff.

Thank you for the advice! I'm sad to hear it hits indie publishers as well as self-pub, but I guess that's the way.

Had I known bout this book before it got removed, I would have bought a copy.

Also available here,

https://nightbeatseu.ca/works/the-sad-bastard-cookbook/

https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook

- "We made it legal with Creative Commons (4.0 attribution non-commercial), but if you get a thrill from breaking the law, you can pretend it’s not."

I love the copyright description. Is this book full of humor like this?

Yes. They note things like being reliably informed salt makes (most) things better.

I would say yes. They try hard to make cooks laugh.

This is one of their recipes:

  APOCALYPSE RAMEN

  This is basically like regular ramen soup but with three critical differences: 

  - It is intensely chaotic, which is to say that you can pretty much toss anything into it and say you did it on purpose.
  - It's slightly healthier, if your depression has lifted enough that you want to eat something other than delicious, delicious chemicals.
  - It involves a mason jar, so you can feel like you're riding out the end of days in true hipster style.

  Core Ingredients & Supplies: 

  - Mason jar or other heatproof receptacle.
  - Boiling water.
  - The only requirement here is rice noodles. Why? Because they cook fast.

  Preparation: 

  - Put all ingredients in the jar.
  - Boil some water.
  - Pour into jar to cover ingredients.
  - Shake it up a bit (not right away, otherwise you'll burn your hands and get more depressed).
  - Let it sit for a few minutes.
  - Enjoy???

  Variations: 

  - Remember those takeout packets of hot sauce and soy sauce? This is a good time to use them.
  - Frozen or fresh vegetables. Wilted is absolutely fine here. International readers may call them "wilty" vegetables. Reader, you are now bilingual.
  - Any kind of spices. We particularly suggest garlic or ginger powder, but seriously, anything will work.
  - If you have tofu or some other protein to use, go for it.

put boiling water in a jar and then shake it up? Ouch! when you agitate hot water, it evaporates a lot faster, bringing the pressure in the jar to great heights. If your seal is not good, or if you open the jar scalding water can come shooting out onto your hands.

a similar thing happens when you put boiling water in a blender and turn the blender on (your blender seal is not good) explosive results.

Please note the name of the recipe.

A playfully dangerous sounding name is no excuse for a recipe that could literally scald your face for life.

It’s a mason jar. If it’s cool enough for you to hold, it’s not going to permanently disfigure you. Plenty of camping recipes involve putting boiling water in pouches and then squeezing and shaking them.

The recipe literally says to wait until the water is no longer boiling hot though. Anyone can harm themselves cooking if they don't follow the actual recipe steps.

As we're beginning to discover in our generation, censorship is largely down to the individual censor, and if you're looking for some kind of underlying rationale, you're wasting your time. Censors too are sad bastards, and the one ray of dark sunshine in their little lives is to make others miserable.

> Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience

Material for their next book!

My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector. Amazon has been flooded with low quality AI generated books in the past ~year, and has been removing a lot of it. My guess would be they're still tweaking their algorithms as folks generating books change their tactics. Hopefully a human will respond soon!

That would be my guess too. A few months back they announced a ML model to clean up the reviews, but I'd argue that it is a lost battle; there is so much human-made and now AI-made garbage already. A solution might be a full deletion and then a real identity verification for reviewers.

Sometimes the merchant will switch a product with reviews with a different product. So it looks like it has 1,000 reviews but in reality most reviews are for something else.

And then you have the ugly stuff; I remember reading a paper (cannot find it now, though) about fraud rigs through which people can buy fraudsters to promote their products and trash their competitors' products. With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate.

> With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate.

It'll become another war of attrition, like other forms of spam & anti-spam.

People need to purchase products to leave reviews, so I doubt AI will run rampant any time soon for reviews.

On Amazon? That's not true - at least on Amazon UK it definitely isn't, just tried and it lets me write a review for a product I never bought without any problem.

These reviews don’t contribute to the overall rating and in some cases are shadow banned.

Aren't people en-masse realising that AI, for all its impressive bling, is a stupid blunt instrument? If you've used it for any amount of time you'll know this. Sure, it's a great time-saver, and if you use it wisely it can remove a lot of tedium. But if you're a developer, one thing you'll know is that it cannot replace developers. You still need to structure your whole project yourself, figure out what the data schema needs to look like, and direct the AI tool to do small sections of the work. And you should be ready to sanity check and debug anything it spits out. Similarly with AI image stuff, if you have a bunch of old black & white photos that were taken on a shitty camera in the 1940s, you can get it to upscale, repair, clean and colourize. But if any living person knows any of the subjects in the photographs, be ready for them to laugh their heads off (or get extremely angry) that grandpappy's eyes are not grandpappy's eyes, that they have lost all family resemblance and look more like expertly stuck-on googly eye stickers. Also the colour palettes are wrong for the time, their teeth get magically straightened, their fob-watch chain gets turned into a rope etc. Some of these un-guided AI effects are as bad as their non-AI counterparts, like Affinity Photo's "magic inpainting" that's supposed to let you easily paint out unwanted items in a photo. They look like magic when removing a seagull from a cloudless sky, but they'll make an absolute hames out of anything remotely complex. For example, removing a person from a busy street. Instead of inventing some plausible background to replace them with, it'll just auto-clone their surroundings into the vacuum so you end up with very obviously duplicated features (door handles, street signs etc). This is something that you would never do as a photography professional. So can it save you a bunch of time? Sometimes. Can you rely on it to work without a human in the loop? You're havin' a laugh!

Something that all AI tools need to build in is the ability to override their learned data and to curb their enthusiasm for inventing completely wrong detail that was never there. While AI has gotten impressive, I wouldn't trust it to do anything remotely important without a competent human driving it.

The biggest problem with AI is that companies that adopt it think that they can fire a bunch of staff and let AI tools run amok.

It's blunt if youre using it for dumb shit in the same way that a hammer is a blunt instrument if used to break peoples stuff. If you are using it for highly domain specific knowledge its very good, whether that's protien folding, teaching you some arcane programming language macro, etc.

If we have to use an analogy I think a better analogy is that it’s blunt like a dull knife. From a ways back it might look sharp but zoom in and it’s not. The only way any of the current ai appears competent in any domain is if the user themselves it not.

I think its totally the other way around actually. It looks blunt from afar, but when you use it on specific fiddly things, it does a great job. Domain experts get the most out of it. The average person really can't use it well.

I do agree with you that output on non domain specific tasks does not stand up to scrutiny. However, I often have to remind people that gpt4, and chatgpt in particular are not really llm's functioning at peak performance. gpt3 was amazing before rlhf. i assume the ungimped gpt4 was even better. Its unfortunate because it has damaged the reputation of what would otherwise be superhuman ai, so now everyone thinks ai is just a shitty ghost writer for corporate safe spam.

Don't get tricked.

> Domain experts get the most out of it. The average person really can't use it well.

This is the exact opposite of what research has shown so far. Top performers show productivity _decreases_ with LLM assistance, lower performers and less experienced users show a modest improvement. [0]

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31161

I reckon the midwit meme applies here.

Noobs think AI is amazing.

Midwits who never bothered to try to leverage it or can't evaluate it or just regurgitate what they hear think it's shit. I wager these people don't create much so they don't have a domain to really apply it, so they rely on others to report how good/bad/useful/shit it is.

Then there are creators or tinkerers who've leveraged AI to do obviously time-saving or amazing things understand its power/potential and they have the receipts.

What you can do with a tool is mostly a reflection of yourself.

So what do you find ai so useful in that you are an expert in?

Apologies for the double response. I hope you have an example of something that you can, as an expert, validate the consistent accuracy of. It would be useful to hear of others experiences that contradict my own. I’m not saying ai isn’t useful for exploring unfamiliar concepts to get ideas of things that can be researched more deeply but this fits more in the “newb” category you describe.

I figured you would have no response here. Dropping in calling people midwits for not totally fawning over these word generators without even a single example.

LLM output reminds me of the essays I had to write in college. They tick all the boxes in a curriculum and demonstrate a basic grasp on syntax, but they're hot garbage. Your first encounter with an editor as a professional or advanced hobbyist burns that away and reveals the foundation of your true form as a writer.

LLMs are in desperate need of something that bridges that gap if they're to do anything more than help people cheat in college and annoy editors. At least for the purpose of producing writing for use. They're great when I want to scrape a web page and its links for archiving and need a quick wget command line.

As an often writer, what I find LLMs useful for is creating an editable basis for subtopics/intro/explanatory text for something I'm reasonably familiar with and could write certainly with the help of some Googling around but might take me an hour between various distractions. It doesn't really work to structure an article for me or to create novel explanations/insights from e.g. data. But it does a decent job a lot of the time with respect to various necessary fleshing out.

No they only write that way because of rlhf. gpt3 was extremely "creative".

You are oversimplified PP's vague language.

That paper shows that AI didn't help people who already had the knowledge that then AI had.

High skill Experts (not customer service reps) use AI to extend their knowledge, like using a new API.

Customer support agents arent really what i meant by... domain expert...

To be fair the guy is speculating (n.b. suggest breaking that first chunk up, it's about a page and half in a single paragraph)

what is being called AI is nothing special its just another script,just like cloud is just storage on another computer.

there was this mentalist act,[kreskin] as many are, the act was a mind reading, clarivoyant number, backed by the same thing "AI" does, i.e. statistical analysis, and ordering, of information gained while evesdropping.

> Hopefully a human will respond soon

I wonder how quick the transition of HITL (Human in the loop) to HOOTL will be.

There will always be a 'request manual review' button.

It'll go to a call centre in the third world where workers are expected to perform a review every 5 seconds.

>My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector.

Maybe not. If you go by the screenshot of the email from Amazon in the Mastodon link, the book was removed for violating "Community Guidelines" instead of the actual content of the book itself.

This is the "Community Guidelines" url in that email: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

So taking Amazon's reason at face value, it means Amazon thinks the author (or author's friends) manipulated the "community" ... i.e. such as creating fake reviews, 5 stars ratings, etc.

An example of tripping the Amazon "community guidelines" algorithm would be something like a suspicious # of reviews coming from different Amazon customers but they're all from the same ip address.

As an example of "inadvertently" setting off Amazon's community guidelines detector... if you're going to ask friends & family to leave positive reviews for your book, make sure they don't do it while they're all there at your house for Thanksgiving dinner.

In the email, the author offered to take down his reviews in hopes that Amazon would reverse its decision.

Seems like a nice way of killing a competitor's products.

> So taking Amazon's reason at face value

Having dealt directly with managing abuse and handling account terminations, the reason you are told is never the actual reason.

As annoying as it is for the 1% of false positives to not get a straight answer, the net effect is the 99% of bad actors don't know what they did to get booted - which means they can't adapt as easily.

Major [citation needed] on that 1%/99% separation there.

Be my guest: https://www.indeed.com/q-fraud-analyst-l-california-jobs.htm...

Here is Amazon's policy on AI-generated content:

> We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390

I personally know someone who published about a dozen AI-generated Kindle books before being notified of this policy, and none of it has been removed.

That policy still seems clear as mud if you're using, say, generative AI within Photoshop to help design components of a cover design. I'm also not sure how that's really different from using CC or public domain imagery as part of a design.

"AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards."

My reading of that is that, if you use AI to create any image even in part, that's AI generated.

WTF is the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted. Seems like a very murky distinction.

I'll give you an example from my recent work.

We just released a new app onto the Apple App Store.

In order to do this, we need to submit a bunch of screenshots, preview videos, and text.

The images and videos, we hand-crafted. A lot of folks automate this, but I think that it's better to hand-craft, if possible, because we need to ensure that specific contexts and whatnot are reflected, and that user privacy is respected.

For the text, we developed a fairly dry blurb, and then I asked ChatGPT4 to rewrite.

I hit "refresh" a few times, and wrote up a text document with the results, and shared that with the team.

We then picked the parts we wanted, and wrote some of our own.

None of the ChatGPT-generated summaries was sufficient, on its own merits. We had to cut-and-paste (sometimes changing the order, and changing to make sure that there was consistency), and add our own content, as well.

I have a feeling that this will be resolved soon.

Frontpage on HN tends to bring results.

I wish the authors luck, and would love to hear the resolution.

For myself, I haven't brought any books on Amazon for a long time, but that's mostly because I dislike the Kindle app, so I get my books through the Apple iBooks store.

Just checked, interestingly it is still available for on demand order via other channels. Wonder if they still print it and only delist on their own frontend [0]. Maybe it is a bit of compensation if they profit from the Streisand effect.

Regarding Amazon I find it funny that they actually engage quite a few people e.g. for tech support of end users. I think they know where to optimize..

[0] https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/suggestartikel/A1067374317

> interestingly it is still available for on demand order via other channels

Where, if you don't mind my asking? This would make an excellent birthday gift for a good friend and I'd prefer to get her the print edition, but a quick search is failing to turn up anywhere that offers an actual hardcopy besides Amazon.

I'm trying to remember what service we considered, when an organization that wrote a book self-published (I was on the committee to write the book).

We ended up actually commissioning normal printing, and selling the book, ourselves (it was quite successful, if I say so, myself. We made our money back in about a month), but we did consider a service that allowed you to sell print-on-demand. They ran the store, and the printer. You could also move eBooks through them.

This was many years ago, and memory fails me.

Memory jogged. It was Lulu. Looked pretty good, but that was many years ago.

This was just a random German online book seller that are connected to a major distribution system. I don't know how it is elsewhere in the world, we in Germany have just a fe major distributors. I remember when publishing my PhD thesis I could chose if I wanted a ISBN and allow global distribution, when self publishing on Amazon (was much cheaper than any other options that required my to buy a batch). Actually small publishers have been living a lot of PhD theses in Germany, but nowadays electronic publication is allowed and not everyone has boxes of their manuscript in the basement as it used to be.

I forgot why I had a pdf of your cookbook, have you at some point gave this out for free?

It is and afaik always has been available for free

Oh got it. Thanks!

For years I made book versions of the articles on my website. When came time to make the third volume, Amazon threw a massive fit that my books were reusing content!

I ended up abandoning their bookmaking service for Lulu. My books are still for sale on Amazon, but I’m not letting them do anything with the printing.

I ran into this with my first book on Amazon maybe a decade ago. I reused/refined a lot of my blog content as well as some material I published elsewhere. But I sent a bunch of links to show that it was my byline and didn't have any issue going forward.

It's still free on itch.io

It also made front page on HN a while back, maybe 6 months ago?

Has the US downgraded to a third world shit hole that people/companies tend to be concerned with this kind of stuff? Disclaimer: I live in such a place and this is normal.

> Amazon in all its wisdom has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook. They won't tell us why.

I mean.. I assume it's right there in the title?

Not that there isn't other stuff available with such words, but there's not much, and the bar/automation might be higher for self-published or other 'indie' stuff? (If anyone's interested in jars of 300 F's to give or not, by the way...)

I'm gonna guess their language police bot took issue with the word "bastard".

That, combined with that it appears to be aimed at "depressed, disabled, and broke folks" (their words, from that link) and I can imagine some people took offense and reported it.

That can't be it. Their are hundreds of books on Amazon with far worse words in the title.

Would you be interested in the paperback version of "Looks Like It's Fuck This Shit O'Clock"?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1092412743/

There must be a whitelist process though: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=bastard&i=stripbooks

What about the book. "How to take a shit in the woods" https://www.amazon.com/How-Shit-Woods-3rd-Environmentally/dp...

Amazon would love to sell me the novel Bastard out of Carolina in paperback or electronic format, or a DVD of the movie made from the novel.

Ok how do I order the book now? Why there is no website to buy it directly?

Use the optimum tactic other sellers do: relabel.

If your first thought was “what is The Sad Bastard Cookbook”, here’s an except (and yes, totally worth fighting for :)

“Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you’ve worked a 16-hour day, when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. It’s vegetarian/vegan. It’s a community-built project. And the e-book is free. It’s hard to survive late capitalism and we want to help.”

Interesting correlation, by the time I got to "when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why" I thought to myself the cookbook had better be vegetarian. Is there a known correlation between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?

That’s a good question (and I don’t know the answer). As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical. And canned/frozen aren’t great options.

The opposite holds true for many veggies because they are seasonal - for big portions of the year, canned or frozen are the best you can get. Beans/lentils, dried or canned, etc.

  > As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical

I usually have some form of pastrami in a well sealed container in the refrigerator, this is one of my ingredients for a need-a-quick-to-prepare-meal. They last for weeks if properly sealed.

But my point wasn't really about the fitness of the specific ingredients, rather, why would I associate those with emotional distress with vegetarians? My wife and daughter are vegetarians and I have no negative associations with that lifestyle. But looking back, many emotionally distressed people that I've met have been vegetarians I think, thought I do not imply that the association also goes the other way.

I wonder if there have been studies on correlations - I should not have been able to predict that.

> As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical. And canned/frozen aren’t great options.

At least where I live, you can get excellent quality canned soup with meat, like goulash or chicken noodle soup.

Also, cured meats like salami or prosciutto have long shelf life in the fridge and are excellent for throwing together quick pasta recipes. Cook pasta, slice a little salami, fry salami in the pan with some oil, maybe add some chili flakes or garlic or fennel seeds, put the al dente pasta and a splash of pasta water in the frying pan, cook for two minutes more, done.

Also raw eggs last more than a month in the fridge. Hard cheese lasts indefinitely if packaged well. Dry cured slab bacon is good for at least a month. And so on.

> Is there a known correlation between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?

Apparently yes [1][2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36045075/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63910-y

That is amazing, I thought that I should not be able to predict that. Thank you.

They should re-publish is as The Sad Motherfucker's Cookbook. There are a lot of sad motherfuckers out there who could use some skill.

I understand the obsession with being on Amazon, but can we please normalize selling elsewhere? The internet is a vast expanse. Why do we think Amazon is the end all be all? I do not understand this.

For consumers, it's easy: Amazon offers a consistent effortless experience. They already have all your payment and shipping data, so no need to create accounts and passwords at some random site with unknown security standards, you know what to expect in terms of shipping vs whatever that random shop is using, no need to worry if the shop will be around in a year or two to honor warranties, no worry about bullshit surrounding returns, warranty claims or refunds.

How does Amazon handle warranties, especially in a year or two? Pray tell.

Amazon is a multibillion dollar company that has a consistent track record of prioritizing customer satisfaction ever since its inception, as does PayPal - admittedly though at the expense of merchants, where we've seen more than enough horror stories on HN about these two companies.

Besides: The chances of either of them going belly-up are faaaaar lower than for Joe Random's webshop or, heaven forbid, physical store.

> Amazon is a multibillion dollar company that has a consistent track record of prioritizing customer satisfaction ever since its inception

A massive issue missing from this statement are the problems around fakes which has grown and is unaddressed by Amazon. Not such an issue with books though.

My experience with warranty at Amazon was nothing but great every single time. Okay, I am from Germany with quite strong consumer protection.

But still. Shopping at Amazon is so damn riskless, why would I buy at a small shop I don't know anything about? I got burned, family got burned - I just became very, very selective with buying elsewhere.

The risk is too damn high.

I lost 450$ on amazon.com for a product that never arrived. Apparently I complained too late and they 'have no shipping info' - might do an ask HN about it and try my best at a writeup.

Amazon is the store. The manufacturer handles warranties. If your Samsung TV breaks you don’t complain to Wal-Mart, you complain to Samsung.

Walmart has return merchandising agreements with suppliers.

> If your Samsung TV breaks you don’t complain to Wal-Mart, you complain to Samsung.

WTF, here in Germany (or rather Europe as a whole) it is the other way around for the mandatory 2 years - if something happens, you return the item where you bought it and the seller is completely responsible for dealing with everything, and on the hook for delivering you a working item.

Only after these two years expire and you have an "extended warranty" in place you have to deal with the manufacturer.

Britain had and still has compatible laws, so I can link to a good summary in English for Americans etc:

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/consumer-...

In my experience: first 2 or 3 months you can send it back np. After 2 years they say your warranty is forfeit. Which isn't true if you can reasonably expect the product to last longer (if it is an expensive one). In my case the battery was damaged due to bogus firmware update and they refused to deal with it, citing warranty with seller is exhausted (untrue). They said I should go to the manufacturer instead. I got "lucky" there: they couldn't repair it and replacement would take 3 months so they proposed sending me a newer revision for an extra price of a little bit over 100 EUR. Result is I will actively buy the product elsewhere if it is an expensive one.

That is so genius: Completely handle all immediate issues which probably involve a lot of idiot user error and no issue on the hardware, and then completely drop fools after 30 days! You only have to deal with the issues that aren't actually issues!

The shipping is huge. I’m so much more inclined to purchase something that’s FBA rather than wait for some seller to see the notification that a sale was made, drive back from the lake house because it’s the weekend, pack up the item on Monday sometime, then finally drive it to the post office on Tuesday.

All the customers are there and the company has perhaps spent more time than any other figuring out how to sell books to people. They're better at it than everyone else.

Not all the customers. I actively avoid Amazon since quite a few years back. There are literally dozens of us!

I was up early one day getting coffee, and saw that one of the book stores in my neighborhood had a line of about 30 people of all ages outside waiting for it to open.

I figured it was an event, and had nothing else to do, so I got in line, too. When the doors opened, they all scattered to different parts of the store. So, no author signing or music release. Just people who like books.

> had nothing else to do, so I got in line, too

Are you British by any chance?

Well, at least he didn't ask anyone what was the event, which is quite proper since they had not been introduced.

Im glad you had a great experience in the bookstore. Unfortunately many bookstores had to close down because of giants like Amazon. Some will stay open but much fewer than before as it becomes a niche rather than a widespread phenomena. I fondly remember spending lots of time in bookstores in the 2000s, it was my favorite pasttime. The experience of browsing books in a bookstore cannot be and will never be produced by the likes of Amazon.

>Unfortunately many bookstores had to close down because of giants like Amazon.

At least around where I live, this wasn't a single-step process. What happened was that big bookstores (both chains and local) started pushing out the mom and pop indies. And then they themselves complained as Amazon in particular ate their lunch.

I really did like going into town to do various shopping, in particular bookstore (new and used) browsing, once or twice a month. On the other hand, I can't say I hate instant ebook delivery or a physical copy in a day or two if that's what I want for some reason.

So not much authors can do.

As a consumer, I invest time and money to try buy elsewhere (and boycott Amazon) when I can, but it's not always easy. Also, I'm aware that these kind of Don Quixote boycots seldomly have an impact macro economically. Nevertheless, I keep trying...

I’m the same. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon in nearly 4 years. The top spot on my “worst companies in the world” list is usually tied between Amazon, Meta and Nestle.

Macroeconomically, it probably makes precisely zero difference, but it makes me feel better to be supporting local shops.

Maybe in the USA, but over here, many book stores are a lot better at selling books (both on- and offline) than Amazon

I read a lot of books. It's pretty much my main source of entertainment. Nobody else came up with something like Kindle Unlimited where you pay a flat fee and read as much as you want instantly. There's entire genres that only exist on amazon that will never appear in a bookstore.

You are describing a library. Those have been around for quite a while.

Nowadays, many do have online offers where you can "borrow" e-books.

Of course, any library's catalogue is probably smaller than Amazons, but they usually are quite up-to-date with mainstream stuff and have more than you could ever hope to read in any case.

Plus you get to have a warm fuzzy feeling for supporting an institution that is really good for your local community :)

I'd frankly rather just support the author directly.

They wrote a book, I'm happy to pay for it in some manner and Kindle Unlimited honestly seems like the fairest possible solution, I as a reader aren't required to buy in advance, I can try it to see if I enjoy it and if I do the author gets paid per page read.

In my areas we have puli libraries with interlinear loan. Being able to read for pleasure is a wonderful luxury!

I think I would miss PINES if I ever left Georgia. The nearest library is tiny, but I can have any of 10 million books delivered to it. And if the system doesn't have it, they appreciate and respond to requests.

We moved from AZ to suburban Atlanta last year, and were familiar with interlibrary loan for rural libraries in AZ. But wow! PINES is sensational. We get books and DVDs, even some BluRays from all over GA. Been watching The Wire again, it's great.

And the inventory isn't censored either. I started a reread of Gravity's Rainbow and that came from Carrolton (college town). Certain gory/raunchy murder mystery series come from the oddest places. Series like Game of Thrones. And highbrow academic stuff like Anne Hollander.

Reminds me I got to log on and extend a couple of titles.

But yeah, we still buy dead tree books, occasionally, from Amazon, but only if we want to keep them. It turns out PINES is great for that, too. Just put it on hold, review it in person, and if it's actually good, buy it.

We did the same -- Sequoyah regional library has been really cool!

> Nobody else came up with something like Kindle Unlimited where you pay a flat fee and read as much as you want instantly

https://www.legimi.pl/

My friend bought a book that was literal gibberish in its thousands of pages. Yes he got a refund. The question still stands, especially among an open source community, WHY is Amazon the defacto? I argue let's stop that

I don't think the solution is quite as simple as choosing to normalise selling elsewhere.

You would have to normalize buying elsewhere for it to make any difference.

When sellers invest time and effort into making it comfortable to buy, there is no problem at all getting customers to pay on your own website, outside of Amazon or other platforms like Booking.com or what have you.

However, most sellers have a hostile attitude towards their own customers, whether the seller is a business or individual. They won't make a decent webpage, they won't make an acceptable and smooth buying experience, and they won't match price or give a better price than the platforms. So, naturally customers will go to who they trust.

Exactly--as a customer, I would love to buy elsewhere! Amazon is such a shitty company and I trust their listings so little, that they are the store of last resort for me. It would be super awesome if when I wanted a product, I could just... go the the manufacturer's web site and buy it. And there should be no mark-up because there is no middle-men. Instead of that, one of these usually happens:

1. The manufacturer doesn't sell its own products! This is usually the case. Often they will helpfully list "dealers" where you can go find it (which all charge more than Amazon).

2. The manufacturer sells the product but their purchase and checkout experience is brutal (and/or it doesn't accept my desired form of payment) and I drop out of the funnel in frustration.

3. The manufacturer sells the product but it is inexplicably 25-50% more than Amazon and 50%-100% more than used on eBay.

They might say they dislike Amazon but they seem to be doing everything they can to push their customers to them.

If there was another store that had all books amazon had, with a Kindle like experience on all possible platforms and e-readers, I might consider that.

The only other store that I know of is Rakuten and that’s by far a worse experience.

For books, I always go to bookshop.org first. They pass some profit along to a local bookstore of your choice.

I don't use amazon (although I cheat a bit because my wife sometimes does). But for books we use indigo.ca (in Canada) which has the same selection and is importantly not Amazon. Is there another national US online bookseller?

For other stuff, I just go to the hardware store. The only real amazon thing I depend on is a kind of micro-fibre wipes I use for my glasses.

It's actually mostly happened organically since amazon got so bad, although the last few times I used it I abandoned my cart trying to navigate the dark pattern of paying without buying prime or getting tricked into shipping fees.

I'm doing something similar. Amazon is Russian propaganda stupid these days and I don't hate myself enough to use it much.

Cut out the words "Russian propaganda" and the post you're replying to makes perfect sense.

i think its an attempt at ad hoc adjectivism. perjorative yes, maybe vaguely humourous. Russian propaganda, isnt exactly the most thought out attempt toward manipulating people. it attempts to muddy the waters, and make everything look like a ridiculous choice.

Russian propaganda is currently the most stupid thing that I know of. I feel more and more stupid each time I read something on X written by Russians (official Kremlin stuff).

>Is there another national US online bookseller?

Barnes and Noble. Their Nook isn't as good, but it's an alternative. I also will buy books [1] direct from publishers, and there are still more narrowly focused sites like History Book Club and Christian Book Distributers.

[1] I dislike using qualifiers (physical books, postal mail) which turn centuries-old words into phrases. If I mean e, I say/write e, otherwise I mean what the words always meant.

I buy my ebooks (lots of them) from the Apple iTunes book store.

However, Apple is almost as controversial (with this crowd), as Amazon.

Is there any good alternatives to Amazon print-on-demand ?

> Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience that we haven't yet managed to do.

It indeed is, I had the same experience. Good idea to asking here, you might just find some

It is that, most likely by design. The harder to access a relatively expensive human, the better the bottom line.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/retail/2022/09/14/how-t...

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