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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 t

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.

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.