5 ms·

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 ou

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.
  - leephillips 9y ago
    That sounds frustrating. But thanks for the reminder about Abe's.
    - arkades 9y ago
      Didn't Amazon acquire Abe's like 10 years back?
      - beastcoast 9y ago
        yes, they were acquired in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks
brudgers 9y ago
A few years ago, I started losing trust in Amazon as what was once a straight forward transaction began to look more and more like an algorithmic semi-scam. I would look for some item and the featured results would be 20% or more than the same item in some duplicated form. For many years Amazon's business model was to generate revenue off of straight forward sales transactions. Today it has shifted to rents and extractions. Prime is perhaps a good first example. Using it complicates transactions and Amazon can arbitrage the eligibility and price of items to extract additional revenues on the fly. However, textbooks are the prime of example of Amazon's new more extractive business practices. It's not just that Amazon wholeheartedly adopted the text book industry's obscene pricing models rather than disrupting them. Nor is it just that Amazon has extended the obscene pricing to rent out ebook versions of textbooks. No, the best expression of Amazon's newly found extractive business practices is in the availability and pricing of used older editions of textbooks on its platform. In the old days, Amazon was a steady source for fairly inexpensive obsolescent editions of current textbooks. Once Amazon seriously entered the textbook business, that seems to have changed and bargains available with deliberate search have disappeared. There really was a change of mindset with Amazon Prime. It was a manifestation of a business cultural value that all customers are not equal as individuals. Maybe it is possible to position an ecommerce site as an upscale brand while still selling Schenzhen's spinners and iPhone cases and unlisted electronics of dubious safety for $0.01. As I've lost trust in Amazon, I've started using Ebay for online purchases. Ebay is orders of magnitude more transparent. Transparency is a good way to create trust. It helps that Ebay's business model is not grossly misaligned with my wallet. It helps that the marker of trust is between buyer and seller rather than stars based on customer reviews. A seller with 10,000 transactions and 99% positive rating is a better indicator of an item's quality than 4 stars based on twenty reviews.
- barking 9y ago
  How is ebay better? The only counterfeit item I have bought on either site was a dell laptop charger on ebay a few years ago. It used to overheat and stopped working after only a few weeks use. Another time a product was never shipped and I had to go through the paypal dispute resolution process which worked fine if a little slowly. I'd have thought ebay would suffer from the same problems as amazon with counterfeit products and fake reviews and then it also has the whole shill bids problem. I moved over to amazon for almost all my online shopping and so far have not had a problem though I appreciate that may just be luck on my part.
wheelerwj 9y ago
i wish there was a setting for this. i really don't like the third party system on amazon.
Spooky23 9y ago
Personally, I've transitioned to the library and local bookstore model for my book purchases.
joemi 9y ago
I'm not saying this accounts for the entirety of the crappy print-on-demand issue you're seeing, but it might account for some: a lot of big publishers make their backstock be POD if it's old enough. For instance, at the bookstore I work at, when we order older Penguin Classics books directly from Penguin Random House, there's at least a 50% chance that we're going to get crappier POD copies from them, the publisher. We list our store's inventory on Amazon, and there have been a few times when a customer returned such books to us, angry that we sent them a POD copy, even after I explained they're actually the copies the publisher sent. That said, we sometimes order books off Amazon for a customer when they're from a publisher we're not planning on placing an order with anytime soon, and it's downright appalling how many sellers send beat up used books as "new" books, or send falling-apart books as "used" books. Can't say we've seen a lot of POD books come in that way, unless they're from tiny publishers who do most/all of their books that way.
Semaphor 9y ago
I honestly don't understand how Amazon is still a thing in the US. At least hn and Reddit discussions make it seem like there are a lot of fake products being sold. Is it extremely overblown? In Germany I've never had this problem and never heard of others having it.
- ericd 9y ago
  I guess this goes to show how unrepresentative online commentary can be, and how easily unrepresentative info can distort our mental model of the world. Far from "not still being a thing", Amazon is absolutely massive in the US, and usage continues to grow at a fast clip. I've never had a problem with fake goods, and I've never met anyone in person who has. Then again, I buy primarily from Amazon or the manufacturer selling on Amazon. It might be because the UI pushes third party sellers.
- spullara 9y ago
  It is likely the same people in every thread complaining about the issues they find in some niche book market most people don't care about. They are likely telling the truth but it also probably doesn't affect that many people.
  - Amezarak 9y ago
    I would agree that the problem decreases with the popularity and recency of the book. If you're talking about a newly published bestseller, which is what I imagine most people buy, your chances of running across a fake are pretty small in my experience. I would be afraid that this could change that, though - especially when e-book editions are released concurrently, it takes only a modicum of effort for a scammer to pirate the book and produce a realistic looking fake. (The advantage here, I suppose, is at least the presence of an official e-book means a professionally edited fake, rather than what you tend to see for out-of-print/old books.) Part of what makes that experience so much smoother is generally speaking, right now, if you go search for a new and/or very popular book, you'll be buying from the publisher or from Amazon.
    - 9y ago
x0x0 9y ago
I haven't had bad experiences with books on amazon, but amazon sold me a charger with a fake Intertek mark (Intertek is an UL competitor). When I told amazon their response was to refund the purchase (good), but continue selling the charger (um, are you fucking kidding me?) product: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY Intertek's statement: http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359756154 http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359...
yellowapple 9y ago
Shameless plug for the Friends of Washoe County Library, to which I have a personal connection and can attest to their books being 100% real (and cheap!). Selection probably ain't great (it relies on book donations, and it only includes the books with high estimated value; the cheaper books are sold in-person by the bag), but it's certainly a start.

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.
- leephillips 9y ago
  That sounds frustrating. But thanks for the reminder about Abe's.
  - arkades 9y ago
    Didn't Amazon acquire Abe's like 10 years back?
    - beastcoast 9y ago
      yes, they were acquired in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks

brudgers 9y ago

A few years ago, I started losing trust in Amazon as what was once a straight forward transaction began to look more and more like an algorithmic semi-scam. I would look for some item and the featured results would be 20% or more than the same item in some duplicated form. For many years Amazon's business model was to generate revenue off of straight forward sales transactions. Today it has shifted to rents and extractions. Prime is perhaps a good first example. Using it complicates transactions and Amazon can arbitrage the eligibility and price of items to extract additional revenues on the fly. However, textbooks are the prime of example of Amazon's new more extractive business practices. It's not just that Amazon wholeheartedly adopted the text book industry's obscene pricing models rather than disrupting them. Nor is it just that Amazon has extended the obscene pricing to rent out ebook versions of textbooks. No, the best expression of Amazon's newly found extractive business practices is in the availability and pricing of used older editions of textbooks on its platform. In the old days, Amazon was a steady source for fairly inexpensive obsolescent editions of current textbooks. Once Amazon seriously entered the textbook business, that seems to have changed and bargains available with deliberate search have disappeared. There really was a change of mindset with Amazon Prime. It was a manifestation of a business cultural value that all customers are not equal as individuals. Maybe it is possible to position an ecommerce site as an upscale brand while still selling Schenzhen's spinners and iPhone cases and unlisted electronics of dubious safety for $0.01. As I've lost trust in Amazon, I've started using Ebay for online purchases. Ebay is orders of magnitude more transparent. Transparency is a good way to create trust. It helps that Ebay's business model is not grossly misaligned with my wallet. It helps that the marker of trust is between buyer and seller rather than stars based on customer reviews. A seller with 10,000 transactions and 99% positive rating is a better indicator of an item's quality than 4 stars based on twenty reviews.

barking 9y ago
How is ebay better? The only counterfeit item I have bought on either site was a dell laptop charger on ebay a few years ago. It used to overheat and stopped working after only a few weeks use. Another time a product was never shipped and I had to go through the paypal dispute resolution process which worked fine if a little slowly. I'd have thought ebay would suffer from the same problems as amazon with counterfeit products and fake reviews and then it also has the whole shill bids problem. I moved over to amazon for almost all my online shopping and so far have not had a problem though I appreciate that may just be luck on my part.

wheelerwj 9y ago

i wish there was a setting for this. i really don't like the third party system on amazon.

Spooky23 9y ago

Personally, I've transitioned to the library and local bookstore model for my book purchases.

joemi 9y ago

I'm not saying this accounts for the entirety of the crappy print-on-demand issue you're seeing, but it might account for some: a lot of big publishers make their backstock be POD if it's old enough. For instance, at the bookstore I work at, when we order older Penguin Classics books directly from Penguin Random House, there's at least a 50% chance that we're going to get crappier POD copies from them, the publisher. We list our store's inventory on Amazon, and there have been a few times when a customer returned such books to us, angry that we sent them a POD copy, even after I explained they're actually the copies the publisher sent. That said, we sometimes order books off Amazon for a customer when they're from a publisher we're not planning on placing an order with anytime soon, and it's downright appalling how many sellers send beat up used books as "new" books, or send falling-apart books as "used" books. Can't say we've seen a lot of POD books come in that way, unless they're from tiny publishers who do most/all of their books that way.

Semaphor 9y ago

I honestly don't understand how Amazon is still a thing in the US. At least hn and Reddit discussions make it seem like there are a lot of fake products being sold. Is it extremely overblown? In Germany I've never had this problem and never heard of others having it.

ericd 9y ago
I guess this goes to show how unrepresentative online commentary can be, and how easily unrepresentative info can distort our mental model of the world. Far from "not still being a thing", Amazon is absolutely massive in the US, and usage continues to grow at a fast clip. I've never had a problem with fake goods, and I've never met anyone in person who has. Then again, I buy primarily from Amazon or the manufacturer selling on Amazon. It might be because the UI pushes third party sellers.
spullara 9y ago
It is likely the same people in every thread complaining about the issues they find in some niche book market most people don't care about. They are likely telling the truth but it also probably doesn't affect that many people.
- Amezarak 9y ago
  I would agree that the problem decreases with the popularity and recency of the book. If you're talking about a newly published bestseller, which is what I imagine most people buy, your chances of running across a fake are pretty small in my experience. I would be afraid that this could change that, though - especially when e-book editions are released concurrently, it takes only a modicum of effort for a scammer to pirate the book and produce a realistic looking fake. (The advantage here, I suppose, is at least the presence of an official e-book means a professionally edited fake, rather than what you tend to see for out-of-print/old books.) Part of what makes that experience so much smoother is generally speaking, right now, if you go search for a new and/or very popular book, you'll be buying from the publisher or from Amazon.
  - 9y ago

x0x0 9y ago

I haven't had bad experiences with books on amazon, but amazon sold me a charger with a fake Intertek mark (Intertek is an UL competitor). When I told amazon their response was to refund the purchase (good), but continue selling the charger (um, are you fucking kidding me?) product: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY Intertek's statement: http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359756154 http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359...

yellowapple 9y ago

Shameless plug for the Friends of Washoe County Library, to which I have a personal connection and can attest to their books being 100% real (and cheap!). Selection probably ain't great (it relies on book donations, and it only includes the books with high estimated value; the cheaper books are sold in-person by the bag), but it's certainly a start.