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In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
- fnord77 7y agosounds like the "rewrites" are scanning errors (counterfeiters are probably digitizing the original works and errors are creeping in) and in the case of the "gibberish" copy, quite clearly a character encoding issue. nothing in the article points to intentional alteration, like the tone of the article suggests
- jhbadger 7y agoMost of it is scanning/encoding errors, true, but the example of the high school edition of _Down and Out_ really does seem to be intentional alteration -- there's no way that rewording "Come here, my chicken" to "Come here" is a technical issue. For whatever reason, a human wanted that change.
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- msbarnett 7y agoThe article cites examples from an unauthorized Abridgement of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London aimed at High School Students. In what way is the existence of that work, with the cited removal of entire parts of sentences for apparent brevity, consistent with your claim that > nothing in the article points to intentional alteration, like the tone of the article suggests ? Did you actually fully read the article?
- chris72205 7y agoWow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are selling.
- mortenjorck 7y agoI will be adding books to the list now too, but the number of categories I won’t shop for on Amazon has ballooned in just the past couple of years. It’s amazing to browse the reviews of brand-name products ranging from kitchen gadgets to yard tools, to even board games, and see customers saying things like “much cheaper plastic than the one I bought at Target” or “huge downgrade in card printing and game piece quality.” It’s not impossible that some of these might legitimately be massive cost-cutting measures by the OEMs, but I have to think most are the result of Amazon’s rampant counterfeiting problem. In fact, I don’t think I really even have a product category blacklist anymore; it’s more of a whitelist. The only thing I will buy at Amazon are products that should be impossible to fake (beyond the industrial design), like an iOS device.
- bdamm 7y agoIt's definitely more work to buy authentic products than it used to be. These days I find myself aborting purchases at the checkout phase, when I can review the actual shipper of the product. If it's "fulfilled by Amazon" or a shipper I already trust, then I consider it good to go, but otherwise, I back out and start over with the same product and a different product link. Now with Amazon fulfilling for other shippers it's going to be really hard unless Amazon can do the heavy lifting to ensure product authenticity on the way in to their warehouses. If they don't, I guess it'll be time to give up on Amazon entirely. This book scanning junk is definitely a next level problem. Wow.
- buckminster 7y ago> Now with Amazon fulfilling for other shippers They've been doing this for years. That's what Fulfilled By Amazon is. And no, they don't reliably check product authenticity.
- jammygit 7y agoThere have been fake iPhones on eBay for a while, with copycat operating systems full of malware
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- whatamidoingyo 7y agoI buy most of my books on ebay from the seller "thrift.books", and some other goodwill ebay/physical stores. They're used, and generally around $3.00/free shipping. Some Goodwill stores have every book priced at $1.00, and have nearly everything you'd want. I'd never buy a new book again, especially from Amazon.
- tjr 7y agoI still buy some new books, but almost all books I have bought for ~10 years have been from Thrift Books (or some other similar seller). Great way to build a library. Many desirable books, often in like-new condition.
- the_watcher 7y agoAgreed, thrift.books seems to be the most reliable way to get a nice physical copy of an older book.
- christophilus 7y agoI just go straight to https://www.thriftbooks.com/ https://www.thriftbooks.com/ generally. I imagine it's the same source.
- galago 7y agoWhen Gnutella file sharing first became popular, I noticed that if I searched for .txt files I could find popular books of the day. Sometimes I would download them and do a find and replace operation to change the names of characters, sometimes to my own name or of other people, just to be silly. I think I did this with all the Harry Potter books. I also recall creating a heavily modified version of Fight Club which had a happy ending. This isn't really what the article is about, but it does show that some edits may well be intentional. None of the works I modified, as far as I recall were in the public domain at the time.
- jhbadger 7y agoAnd about a decade ago there was a brief humor fad that consisted of modifying public domain classic literature to add fantasy or SF features -- "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Android Karenina" and so on -- but obviously the people buying those knew that they weren't buying the original works.
- entropicdrifter 7y agoWho could forget "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" ? They even made a movie of that one
- varjag 7y agoAmazon had it's share of trashy classic copies for a while. https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Illustrated-Platinum-ebook/dp/B017YB4AJ4/ https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Illustrated-Platin...
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- zwerdlds 7y agoI'm genuinely curious - can someone explain how Amazon has avoided litigation on this for so long?
- Despegar 7y agoIf you're wondering about some weird social ill plaguing society from the tech industry, 99% of the time the root cause of it is Section 230.
- dfsegoat 7y agoSection 230 of what code / title? https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/ECFR?page=browse https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/ECFR?page=browse
- Despegar 7y agoOf the Communications Decency Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sec...
- joering2 7y agoWho's gonna litigate them? When you hire tens of thousands of people around USA all of sudden bunch of politicians, lawyers and judges roots for you and wishes you all the best, each for different reason. I mean which prosecutor that ultimately answers in some manner to a mayor of a big city that his/her future depends of how many Amazon employees will get hired/fired, will shit in their own sandbasket and go after Besos? Sure, if you me or Joe Doe opens an online store and have 1% of counterfeit problem than Bezos currently has, you would be SWAT-teamed, locked in jail and probably without bail too, with your finances frozen so you barely can afford a lawyer. But that's corporate America. This is business and that's how things work here in grand scheme of things when you become too big to jail/litigate.
- dmart 7y agoPerhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for important texts? Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings, forewards, etc.
- caseysoftware 7y agoBut what is the "main text" and who has the definitive copy? At first glance, most people would think of chapter text and headings but even that can vary from edition to edition and printing to printing and country to country and translation to translation. How are typos/corrections handled and who has the right to make them? Then we need the schema/structure for the content. And that schema has to preserve whitespace because while it's not important most of the time, other times it's vital like in poetry. Obviously, we need to be careful of character encodings too. But most artists and writers consider their "work" to not just be the final product itself but the things that go around it like cover art, dedications, etc. At first glance, this is an "easy" problem but gets ugly quickly. It's also fascinating though. * I spent a few years at the Library of Congress working on their digital preservation project so lived and breathed these questions. When we worked with records (as in the musical kind), the album and cover art was just as important as the actual music most of the time.
- sgt101 7y agoOk - your points are all valid, but they are also huge. So if we try and address them we will get nowhere for a long time. What would the MVP of this be? What if we had a register of signed checksums with reputation and community selection (I trust these folks, but not these folks, verified artist wins)?
- holy_city 7y agoImo this is just good old fashioned quality control. When you can't trust your wholesaler you randomly sample the shipment and test it, rejecting the whole shipment (or exact penalties) for product outside an acceptable threshold. The publisher could supply a manuscript. It could be compared against the manuscript database (note: not with a checksum), and if it's too similar to other copyrighted works then it should flagged for manual review, and rejected if identical. That way you leave the door open for new translations/editions from different publishers, which should be treated as separate products. Then when the shipment of physical books arrive, you sample them via OCR + text differences and if it's outside your standards, reject it. But like the article mentions, that's expensive.
- imgabe 7y ago1984 was published in 1949, 70 years ago. The author died in 1950. If it weren't for ridiculous US copyright laws, reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices and there would be no black market for low-quality knock-offs.
- lsc 7y ago>reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices so I read a lot. Mostly on the kindle. Lots of public domain classics; I love Conrad and Melville. I'm also pretty happy to kick in ten or fifteen bucks to avoid spending time finding the best formatted/least incorrect copy, even if the book is public domain. but you know what? when I buy public domain e-books, there's so much crap mixed in that is worse than gutenberg that I often end up going with Gutenberg first these days, if my favorite publishing houses don't have a copy. It's actually easier, I think, for me to find quality e-books of books that are still under copyright. I mean, this is mostly me complaining about amazon and how they aren't really serving my needs even when I'm begging them to take more of my money... but it's also a point that finding reputable public domain copies is awful hard. For those of my taste looking... my favorite publishing house for that sort of thing is Melville house publishing; but they have something of a limited selection of public domain reprints. (they do have their 'art of the novella' series, which comes out in the cutest little paperbacks. And their kindle formatting is consistently good.) on the other hand gutenberg formatting isn't great, but it's consistently not terrible, which is more than I can say for a lot of the dreck you find in the kindle store. And a lot of people have a different time/money equation, and sometimes books under copyright aren't available on the kindle at all and paper copies can get pricy (and are way harder to read, for me at least) so certainly public domain is a good thing that should be preserved. I'm just saying, it's not a panacea when it comes to badly-done e-books
- austhrow743 7y agoFound this here on HN a little while ago. Public domain ebooks but with higher formatting standards than Gutenberg. Less selection as a result but might be worth checking out: https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/
- alasarmas 7y agoThe writer of this piece did not note that the pen-name of the editor of the "high school edition" of "Down and Out in Paris and London", Moira Propreat, is an obvious pun on the phrase "more appropriate". So obvious it didn't need to be mentioned?
- umvi 7y agoCould it just be that bootleg operations are scanning in the books with cameras rigs, and then using tesseract or some similar OCR to parse the text back out and then running it through Microsoft Word spell check to manually resolve conversion errors?
- _eqet 7y agoThis is scary & ridiculous... we have to deal with #fakebooks now as well as #fakenews?
- weq 7y agoPower corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. If your in the game of monopolising online sales, your not here for a long time, your here for a good time. Fake items have made alot of people rich. Amazon needs a cut of that pie. How else do you maintain growth year in and year out?
- packetpirate 7y agoI love how the High School edition of Down and Out in Paris and London says it was edited by Moira Propeat...... in 2105.
- GregoryVPerry 7y agoIt would be great if you manbun faggots would not post paywalled articles.