7 ms·

This article reads like a poorly researched PR piece for the publishing industry. They're not really saying anywhere.the books by third party sellers are fake.

by sfifs 9y ago

This article reads like a poorly researched PR piece for the publishing industry. They're not really saying anywhere.the books by third party sellers are fake. Then they must have come from the publisher legitimately one way or the other and hence the publisher must have been paid. The only difference is how much he was paid. It's likely some country branch of the publisher cut a deal to unload some books for cheap to a distributor and that's coming back to Amazon. So the publishing executive in that market made lot's of revenue in his scorecard at the cost of cannibalizing Amazon account seller's business. This sort of thing is quite common and perfectly legal.

DanBC 9y ago
There's a potential of grey market imports. If a publisher has a lower quality, but much cheaper, product for one market, and a higher quality more expensive product for the US market, buyers should have the choice, but should also know what they're buying.
- merb 9y ago
  I would not be happy if a publisher would make such things. I mean there's mostly a hardcover and a paperback version, yes. but if they actually make books in lower qualities for others markets, that would be hilarious. why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products? isn't this some sort of discrimination?
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    > why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products It would be even worse if customers in the poorer market only had access to products they can't afford. The important thing IMHO is that the lower quality version also has a lower price, and that, in case of re-import, there's a way for customers to know.
  - blackoil 9y ago
    In a country like India, we had eastern economy and similarly other subsidized editions. If a book costs 100 USD, it is beyond range of most students, as this crosses their monthly budget. So, while arbitrary these barriers have the place till we have movement of people.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    Price discrimination, yeah. You make cheap versions of a product for people who are very price sensitive- that is, people without much money. You still make a profit, they get a version of the product they can afford. I did this with math textbooks in college. You can buy "gray market" books, which are versions made for foreign markets but bought by resellers and reimported to the US. They're the same exact book, but printed without color, on cheap paper in a cheap binding. This was perfect for me, since they were also much cheaper than the US edition. If anything, the discrimination was going the other way. The only way to get a cheap copy of the book was to buy it off the gray market- the punisher wouldn't sell the cheap editions inside the US.
- KevinEldon 9y ago
  Publishers use ISBN #s to differentiate the quality and content of their books today. Unless the publishers are trying to deceive consumers by using the same ISBN # for significantly different quality copies of a book then I don't see how this is a new risk to consumers.
  - joemi 9y ago
    Adding to this, if a seller on Amazon sends you a different ISBN than the one you ordered, you can return it, because that's not what you ordered.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  Why? Unless the cheaper product is of an inferior quality than the more expensive product, then it is capitalism trying to route around an artificial cost.
- joemi 9y ago
  Those cheaper copies for non-US markets are what's typically called (at least in the textbook world) as "international" editions. They're not allowed to be sold on Amazon, as per Amazon's policies. It's a shame too, because textbooks are usually so very expensive. And as noted elsewhere, they have different ISBNs than the US editions, so if a seller send and int'l edition when you ordered a US edition, they did not send the book you ordered and the ISBN discrepancy proves that, so you should return it and complain to Amazon.
Amezarak 9y ago
Unless you're buying a relatively new book, book buying on Amazon is an incredibly painful experience. I've given up almost altogether. There are a number of outright fakes, but the main problem is the massive number of really crappy print-on-demand OCR/scanned books. The only way I do continue to buy books on Amazon if they're sold by Amazon and fulfilled by Amazon, which it sounds like that will generally be less findable. It simply isn't worth the trouble. I have no sympathy for the publishers - I have no problem at all buying used books - but there is more to the story.
- DennisP 9y ago
  You must be in a different market niche than me. I buy a lot of books and I've had no issues at all, even from third-party sellers of old books.
- leephillips 9y ago
  I don't doubt that this is your experience. Personally, I've benefited greatly from buying used books from third parties on Amazon. Unusual books that are long out of print, useful for my research, for $5 shipped? It's great. And so far, they've all been in near-perfect condition - usually books sold by libraries that have never or rarely been checked out.
  - Amezarak 9y ago
    I have no problem with the quality of used books, when they are what they say they are. I buy anything old or unusual on AbeBooks for the most part, which apparently is part? owned by Amazon. There are some POD results, but they seem to be mostly correctly labeled and to not flood the marketplace nearly as much. I own a lot of books that were printed in the 1800s but still in great shape. This phenomenon is definitely most prominent in the market we're talking about (though I've also seen it with much newer books), so to take an example, consider Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=History+of+Friedrich+the+Great+Carlyle&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AHistory+of+Friedrich+the+Great+Carlyle https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da... The first print copy in my search results is titled "History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia - Frederick The Great-Complete Table of Contents: 22 Volumes". This is literally a print-on-demand copy of the table of contents. The first reviewer also notes that it's "hard to read." It also costs $10. The next print edition is also a POD of the table of contents. The next is a print edition of the "first volume" (what the first volume actually consists of is not mentioned; the work was published in different editions with different volume counts) by Forgotten Books, which is a relatively OK POD publisher. (I would buy it if truly desperate, but not normally.) Continuing to go through this search, I can't confidently find a single good copy of any volume. I think maybe the "Elibron Classics" copy of Volume X is good. Some of the POD are better than others. Some of them are clear scams - for example, the "Works of Thomas Carlyle" for $14.40 that claims to be his complete works...in 336 pages. (Carlyle's actual complete works would fill quite a bit more space.) I think the $1500 one on page 2 might be good, but there's no picture. It's not that good, cheap copies of the book don't exist. I recently bought a full set of an 1900 edition for $80, which was still higher than I liked, but finding full used sets can be difficult. Here's tons of copies of "real" volumes: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Carlyle&sortby=17&tn=Friedrich+the+Great&xpod=on&cm_sp=pan-_-srp-_-xpod https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Carlyle&so... This is an especially egregious example, since I don't think the book has been reputably printed since 1969 and it's in the public domain; for most books the bad stuff is merely interleaved, instead of being almost all you can find.
sehugg 9y ago
I think the concerns of the "publishing industry" also apply to authors that self-publish on say, Amazon's CreateSpace.
- manojlds 9y ago
  How? As long as it is not piracy, how are they affected?
  - sehugg 9y ago
    Here are some quotes from the article: Amazon’s third-party sellers have to offer new books, not used ones, but in many cases they don’t seem to have bought their books from publishers. No one is quite sure where their books come from, including, it seems, Amazon itself. -- Some of the comments in this thread link to pictures of counterfeit books. If the Buy Box winner for a book is out of stock, it will look to most customers as though the book is out of stock everywhere. -- This would cost the author a sale. Many shoppers don't realize that the Buy Box is only one merchant out of many. This policy is part of Amazon’s ongoing, years-long quest to drive down the price of books. -- See the App Store for the endgame of race-to-the-bottom prices.
    - rahimnathwani 9y ago
      How would an offer which is out of stock win the buy box? I'm pretty sure that if there's at least one seller with stock, that the buy box would show one of them.
      - tkxxx7 9y ago
        Did you read the article? This was mentioned and multiple tweets were quoted.
        rahimnathwani 9y ago
        Yes, I did. And followed the links in the Tweets. The article suggests that it's possible that the buy box winner is out of stock, whilst at least one seller (Amazon or a third party seller, e.g. the publisher) is in stock. The tweets don't assert that. The links and screenshots referred to by the tweets also demonstrate no such thing. Specifically, regarding the tweets: - One of the links is to an Amazon page. The winner of the buy box when I open the page is 'In stock' - The other link is to a HuffPo article, which contains some screenshots. The screenshots include buy boxes, but none of the screenshots show a buy box that's been won by an out-of-stock seller.
jlarocco 9y ago
Do you actually buy things on Amazon? Have you bought things from third party sellers? Maybe third party sellers aren't selling fake books yet, but no doubt they will be soon. I spends thousands of dollars a year on Amazon, and I simply won't buy from third party sellers because they're notorious for selling counterfeits, having terrible shipping, problematic returns, etc. It's easier to avoid them altogether than it is to go through the hassle and disappointment of dealing with the bad ones, and there are a lot of bad ones. On top of that, Amazon apparently just doesn't care - I've seen product pages where 50% (or more) of the reviews claim they got a counterfeit that didn't work, yet the counterfeit seller(s) is still the default option. The third party seller program has completely undermined the trust I had in Amazon. In the past I'd buy on Amazon because I could trust I was getting a legitimate product with a solid return policy that would arrive on schedule in a few days. All of that disappears with third party sellers. If I can't find an item sold directly from Amazon (which is getting harder to discern), then I don't buy it on amazon.com.

by sfifs 9y ago

DanBC 9y ago

There's a potential of grey market imports. If a publisher has a lower quality, but much cheaper, product for one market, and a higher quality more expensive product for the US market, buyers should have the choice, but should also know what they're buying.

merb 9y ago
I would not be happy if a publisher would make such things. I mean there's mostly a hardcover and a paperback version, yes. but if they actually make books in lower qualities for others markets, that would be hilarious. why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products? isn't this some sort of discrimination?
- danmaz74 9y ago
  > why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products It would be even worse if customers in the poorer market only had access to products they can't afford. The important thing IMHO is that the lower quality version also has a lower price, and that, in case of re-import, there's a way for customers to know.
- blackoil 9y ago
  In a country like India, we had eastern economy and similarly other subsidized editions. If a book costs 100 USD, it is beyond range of most students, as this crosses their monthly budget. So, while arbitrary these barriers have the place till we have movement of people.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  Price discrimination, yeah. You make cheap versions of a product for people who are very price sensitive- that is, people without much money. You still make a profit, they get a version of the product they can afford. I did this with math textbooks in college. You can buy "gray market" books, which are versions made for foreign markets but bought by resellers and reimported to the US. They're the same exact book, but printed without color, on cheap paper in a cheap binding. This was perfect for me, since they were also much cheaper than the US edition. If anything, the discrimination was going the other way. The only way to get a cheap copy of the book was to buy it off the gray market- the punisher wouldn't sell the cheap editions inside the US.
KevinEldon 9y ago
Publishers use ISBN #s to differentiate the quality and content of their books today. Unless the publishers are trying to deceive consumers by using the same ISBN # for significantly different quality copies of a book then I don't see how this is a new risk to consumers.
- joemi 9y ago
  Adding to this, if a seller on Amazon sends you a different ISBN than the one you ordered, you can return it, because that's not what you ordered.
tomjen3 9y ago
Why? Unless the cheaper product is of an inferior quality than the more expensive product, then it is capitalism trying to route around an artificial cost.
joemi 9y ago
Those cheaper copies for non-US markets are what's typically called (at least in the textbook world) as "international" editions. They're not allowed to be sold on Amazon, as per Amazon's policies. It's a shame too, because textbooks are usually so very expensive. And as noted elsewhere, they have different ISBNs than the US editions, so if a seller send and int'l edition when you ordered a US edition, they did not send the book you ordered and the ISBN discrepancy proves that, so you should return it and complain to Amazon.

Amezarak 9y ago

Unless you're buying a relatively new book, book buying on Amazon is an incredibly painful experience. I've given up almost altogether. There are a number of outright fakes, but the main problem is the massive number of really crappy print-on-demand OCR/scanned books. The only way I do continue to buy books on Amazon if they're sold by Amazon and fulfilled by Amazon, which it sounds like that will generally be less findable. It simply isn't worth the trouble. I have no sympathy for the publishers - I have no problem at all buying used books - but there is more to the story.

DennisP 9y ago
You must be in a different market niche than me. I buy a lot of books and I've had no issues at all, even from third-party sellers of old books.
leephillips 9y ago
I don't doubt that this is your experience. Personally, I've benefited greatly from buying used books from third parties on Amazon. Unusual books that are long out of print, useful for my research, for $5 shipped? It's great. And so far, they've all been in near-perfect condition - usually books sold by libraries that have never or rarely been checked out.
- Amezarak 9y ago
  I have no problem with the quality of used books, when they are what they say they are. I buy anything old or unusual on AbeBooks for the most part, which apparently is part? owned by Amazon. There are some POD results, but they seem to be mostly correctly labeled and to not flood the marketplace nearly as much. I own a lot of books that were printed in the 1800s but still in great shape. This phenomenon is definitely most prominent in the market we're talking about (though I've also seen it with much newer books), so to take an example, consider Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=History+of+Friedrich+the+Great+Carlyle&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AHistory+of+Friedrich+the+Great+Carlyle https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da... The first print copy in my search results is titled "History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia - Frederick The Great-Complete Table of Contents: 22 Volumes". This is literally a print-on-demand copy of the table of contents. The first reviewer also notes that it's "hard to read." It also costs $10. The next print edition is also a POD of the table of contents. The next is a print edition of the "first volume" (what the first volume actually consists of is not mentioned; the work was published in different editions with different volume counts) by Forgotten Books, which is a relatively OK POD publisher. (I would buy it if truly desperate, but not normally.) Continuing to go through this search, I can't confidently find a single good copy of any volume. I think maybe the "Elibron Classics" copy of Volume X is good. Some of the POD are better than others. Some of them are clear scams - for example, the "Works of Thomas Carlyle" for $14.40 that claims to be his complete works...in 336 pages. (Carlyle's actual complete works would fill quite a bit more space.) I think the $1500 one on page 2 might be good, but there's no picture. It's not that good, cheap copies of the book don't exist. I recently bought a full set of an 1900 edition for $80, which was still higher than I liked, but finding full used sets can be difficult. Here's tons of copies of "real" volumes: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Carlyle&sortby=17&tn=Friedrich+the+Great&xpod=on&cm_sp=pan-_-srp-_-xpod https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Carlyle&so... This is an especially egregious example, since I don't think the book has been reputably printed since 1969 and it's in the public domain; for most books the bad stuff is merely interleaved, instead of being almost all you can find.

sehugg 9y ago

I think the concerns of the "publishing industry" also apply to authors that self-publish on say, Amazon's CreateSpace.

manojlds 9y ago
How? As long as it is not piracy, how are they affected?
- sehugg 9y ago
  Here are some quotes from the article: Amazon’s third-party sellers have to offer new books, not used ones, but in many cases they don’t seem to have bought their books from publishers. No one is quite sure where their books come from, including, it seems, Amazon itself. -- Some of the comments in this thread link to pictures of counterfeit books. If the Buy Box winner for a book is out of stock, it will look to most customers as though the book is out of stock everywhere. -- This would cost the author a sale. Many shoppers don't realize that the Buy Box is only one merchant out of many. This policy is part of Amazon’s ongoing, years-long quest to drive down the price of books. -- See the App Store for the endgame of race-to-the-bottom prices.
  - rahimnathwani 9y ago
    How would an offer which is out of stock win the buy box? I'm pretty sure that if there's at least one seller with stock, that the buy box would show one of them.
    - tkxxx7 9y ago
      Did you read the article? This was mentioned and multiple tweets were quoted.
      - rahimnathwani 9y ago
        Yes, I did. And followed the links in the Tweets. The article suggests that it's possible that the buy box winner is out of stock, whilst at least one seller (Amazon or a third party seller, e.g. the publisher) is in stock. The tweets don't assert that. The links and screenshots referred to by the tweets also demonstrate no such thing. Specifically, regarding the tweets: - One of the links is to an Amazon page. The winner of the buy box when I open the page is 'In stock' - The other link is to a HuffPo article, which contains some screenshots. The screenshots include buy boxes, but none of the screenshots show a buy box that's been won by an out-of-stock seller.

jlarocco 9y ago

Do you actually buy things on Amazon? Have you bought things from third party sellers? Maybe third party sellers aren't selling fake books yet, but no doubt they will be soon. I spends thousands of dollars a year on Amazon, and I simply won't buy from third party sellers because they're notorious for selling counterfeits, having terrible shipping, problematic returns, etc. It's easier to avoid them altogether than it is to go through the hassle and disappointment of dealing with the bad ones, and there are a lot of bad ones. On top of that, Amazon apparently just doesn't care - I've seen product pages where 50% (or more) of the reviews claim they got a counterfeit that didn't work, yet the counterfeit seller(s) is still the default option. The third party seller program has completely undermined the trust I had in Amazon. In the past I'd buy on Amazon because I could trust I was getting a legitimate product with a solid return policy that would arrive on schedule in a few days. All of that disappears with third party sellers. If I can't find an item sold directly from Amazon (which is getting harder to discern), then I don't buy it on amazon.com.