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If you consider my perspective is that eBay / Amazon / et al are acting with the least amount of policing effort they can legally or financially commit, then ye

If you consider my perspective is that eBay / Amazon / et al are acting with the least amount of policing effort they can legally or financially commit, then yes, I would like to advocate that a marketplace such as eBay should attempt to verify every item it sells is not counterfeit. I'd like to avoid being unrealistic in that I don't think a marketplace can 100% verify every item and grow to scale, but I'm also extremely annoyed at the "all or nothing" kind of false dichotomy you've presented. I'm not trying to be insulting or glib with the following, but if you'd like to peruse several different threads in this discussion it appears Amazon has more than enough reasonable data to address an issue, but has heretofore turned a blind-yet-financially-beneficial-in-principle-eye to the situation. If a bunch of humans sitting around and spit balling can hammer down a half-dozen examples and concerns out of altruism then I think any attempts of offloading that 'check and balance' into the Amazon system is quite significant. If they get around to it, I'd classify their pragmatic motivation as akin to "I'm sorry your feelings were hurt" moreso than "What I did hurt you and was wrong."

BubbleFett 10y ago
Totally sympathetic to the author here, and believe that the counterfeit should be taken down IMMEDIATELY (checking amazon it looks like this is the case) If the book was digital then I would say preemptive verification should be done. However, for a physical paper book how could you verify legitimacy at scale? It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort. What would you propose? Not trying to be confrontational, legitimately curious!
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Certificates of provenance or authorisation. If Amazon require a machine-readable mechanism, they've the heft to provide one. PKI or Blockchain-all-the-things.
- billpollock 10y ago
  In both cases a five year old child could tell the difference in an instant.
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort. I've worked at places with serious quality management systems, the problem isn't hard. The answer is easy and obvious: incoming inspection. Unless "scale" means the percentage of product that passes through inspection is zero. In which case the problem is only hard because the problem isn't how to do something, the problem is how get the benefit of having done something without doing it (whether through inspection, not co-mingling, etc...). In the case of No Starch Press, the build quality issues were noticeable without scanning the book. And even cutting the spine and covers off of a book to scan it isn't that much manual effort with the right hardware. One of the offices at my college had the cutter and bulk scanner, it was so not a big deal for them to use that they'd digitize a semester's worth of course textbooks for anyone who asked.
7952 10y ago
What annoys me is that they do not share that data with consumers. Just rely on people to self report issues in feedback which is not the same thing. If the seller takes two weeks to reply to a query from a customer then that should be reported.

BubbleFett 10y ago

Totally sympathetic to the author here, and believe that the counterfeit should be taken down IMMEDIATELY (checking amazon it looks like this is the case) If the book was digital then I would say preemptive verification should be done. However, for a physical paper book how could you verify legitimacy at scale? It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort. What would you propose? Not trying to be confrontational, legitimately curious!

dredmorbius 10y ago
Certificates of provenance or authorisation. If Amazon require a machine-readable mechanism, they've the heft to provide one. PKI or Blockchain-all-the-things.
billpollock 10y ago
In both cases a five year old child could tell the difference in an instant.
forgottenpass 10y ago
It's a hard problem. I can't think of a way that doesn't involve destroying a physical copy to OCR, and that's a lot of manual effort. I've worked at places with serious quality management systems, the problem isn't hard. The answer is easy and obvious: incoming inspection. Unless "scale" means the percentage of product that passes through inspection is zero. In which case the problem is only hard because the problem isn't how to do something, the problem is how get the benefit of having done something without doing it (whether through inspection, not co-mingling, etc...). In the case of No Starch Press, the build quality issues were noticeable without scanning the book. And even cutting the spine and covers off of a book to scan it isn't that much manual effort with the right hardware. One of the offices at my college had the cutter and bulk scanner, it was so not a big deal for them to use that they'd digitize a semester's worth of course textbooks for anyone who asked.

7952 10y ago

What annoys me is that they do not share that data with consumers. Just rely on people to self report issues in feedback which is not the same thing. If the seller takes two weeks to reply to a query from a customer then that should be reported.