10 ms·

Kindle edition of Classic Computer Science Problems in Python is unauthorized

170 points by WoodenChair 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago
Sounds about like the physical products on Amazon these days.
- Wistar 6y ago
  This. I have to be so careful about making sure who it is that is the actual vendor. Amazon used to clearly state that a product was "sold and fulfilled by amazon" but I don't see that anymore.
  - bb101 6y ago
    I've read that Amazon warehouses mix every vendor's products with the same UPC code into the same box. If that's true, then it's pot luck whether you receive a legitimate or fake product.
matsemann 6y ago
> There is literally a poorly formatted pirated version of my book on the Amazon Kindle store accumulating 1 and 2 star reviews for its poor formatting that count against all editions. So not only do they commingle physical items so you never know what you get. They also allow other people's products to affect your rating.
- Shacklz 6y ago
  That struck me as especially egregious; even if the e-book-version was legitimate, why on earth would anyone think that merging these reviews is a good idea? Some tech books are, in my opinion, terrible for e-book without adjustments and vice versa (e.g., description on left page and corresponding picture on right page might work quite well in a paper book but not in an ebook where you see only one page at a time); why would these ever be merged? Is this a normal thing on Amazon? Speaking as someone who never ordered anything from Amazon as it barely services my country
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    I don't work at Amazon, but worked at a similar (European, national) retailer: You really have to walk the line between ratings-per-SKU and aggregate ratings sometimes. In an ideal world, the reading experience of a Kindle book is the same as the physical book. So someone might argue that ratings should be aggregated across all version of the product. Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance. Similarly, do you really want people to leave ratings on a black shirt in size L, and that rating not apply to all sizes and colors? I assume someone at Amazon thinks about this, and the defaults (fashion => merge, books => merge, electronics => donotmerge) etc. do OK until complaints come in. There's no profit in not being heavy-handed.
    - WoodenChair 6y ago
      > In an ideal world, the reading experience of a Kindle book is the same as the physical book. So someone might argue that ratings should be aggregated across all version of the product. Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance. Right, the issue though is that there is a much larger gulf between the eBook and print book than there is between the paperback and hardcover. And the delivery mechanism can greatly affect your enjoyment of the book. It's about more than just appearance. Source code in particular, does not often work well on a Kindle's tiny screen.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Although maybe it does if you read it on a full-size tablet. In general, I mostly avoid buying books I know aren't 95% text in Kindle format unless they're very cheap or are from a known publisher for things like guidebooks. They can work well but it's definitely hit or miss. (I also just don't like ebooks for certain types of references where I want to stick post-its etc.)
      - ThePadawan 6y ago
        I personally fully agree! But I imagine a PM at Amazon was presented with the question "Should ratings of all versions of books be merged?". Unless they really really cared (or personally had experienced dramatic differences between versions of books before), they probably said "Yeah sure". (I'm also biased a bit in that I assume that implementing this more fine-grained would cost more than $0).
- tzs 6y ago
  You used to be able to at least hit the link to see all reviews. The all reviews filtering options included one to filter by format. This helped a lot. I don't see that anymore. Also, on the reviews themselves it used to state what format a given review was for. I don't see that anymore either. So...it looks like Amazon deliberately decided to make it harder to tell if the Kindle edition is good or not.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    Review filtering is still available for many products, see my note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24400210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24400210 for how to get there. Unfortunately it's not available for this book. (You can filter by star rating but not by edition.)
bzb5 6y ago
Maybe you should’ve made a Kindle edition yourself if you didn’t want an automated crappy version to show.
waihtis 6y ago
This is just a core component of Amazon's business model which can best be characterized as "intentional oversight", where little effort is made against illegitimate users and scenarios if they bring in revenue for them. It has been true for a very long time in many different scenarios, including physical piracy and (via hearsay) lax credit card validation policies.
- my123 6y ago
  > lax credit card validation policies However, if you try to pay through a bank account (at least in Germany), it's an utter pain. Same with Maestro debit cards...
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    That’s because you have consumer protection laws putting Amazon on the hook if that use was unauthorized.
  - amaccuish 6y ago
    I tried this the other day since amazon.de kept bugging me about it. But what's the point. Like is it cheaper for Amazon than Mastercard? If I pay with my mastercard I get a notification instantly and the money disappears. With SEPA-Lastschrift it takes ages and makes budgeting difficult.
- gruez 6y ago
  >and (via hearsay) lax credit card validation policies. Is that really a problem? AFAIK in card not present transactions (aka. buying stuff online), the merchant is eating the cost of chargebacks.
  - waihtis 6y ago
    I dont know enough to confidently comment, but at the time the approach was clearly distinct from everyone else in the market
guiambros 6y ago
This sucks: "It's crazy that @Amazon has allowed this. There is literally a poorly formatted pirated version of my book on the Amazon Kindle store accumulating 1 and 2 star reviews for its poor formatting that count against all editions." I enjoyed the book (paper copy, purchased from Manning), so this prompted me to leave an official review.
- WoodenChair 6y ago
  Thank you for your support!
ffpip 6y ago
How is Amazon allowed to advertise Kindle so much beside every book on the website? Isn't it anti competitive? Whenever you click on a book, it defaults to the Kindle version. When you change it to the paperback edition, you are faced with banners on all 4 sides saying 'Kindle is good, fast and easy', etc etc
- DharmaPolice 6y ago
  Probably but you're on their site at this stage, buying from them. Yes, they are pushing you to a product that (I assume) has a margin higher profit margin, but this is not like a neutral product comparison site.
mellosouls 6y ago
For anybody who would like to sample this interesting sounding book, there appears to be substantial preview contents available on the publisher's site with a nice audio version as well. I don't know the limitations; it appears to be constrained by viewport access only (ie. you can read it all without signing in but not offline; it scrambles text when you scroll). Example: https://livebook.manning.com/book/classic-computer-science-problems-in-python/chapter-4 https://livebook.manning.com/book/classic-computer-science-p... Nice presentation work by Manning/Livebook.
null_object 6y ago
This has become a really serious problem buying any sort of Kindle book these days. I got very tired of the OCR-created classic books that are sold with poor formatting, spelling errors and sometimes even remnants of the conversion process left in the text, so I always really carefully search for specific publishers, for instance "Jane Austen Sanditon Penguin English Library" (or similar). But even here all the reviews for the tens of different editions are simply mingled together - including people complaining about torn paperback covers, and random editions that are stolen from Project Gutenberg and sold for profit on Amazon, as well as some that are simply gibberish and seem to have been run through Google-translate. That particular edition above even links to the wrong item from the search. So sad that Amazon don't even care about their Kindle book inventory any longer: this is an area where they could easily guarantee authenticity and quality - if they could give a shit.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >random editions that are stolen from Project Gutenberg and sold for profit on Amazon, Most of what is on Project Gutenberg is public domain so it's not being "stolen." If it's a simple copy and paste with no added value and it's being sold, that's a bit slimy but it's not stealing.
- nebulous1 6y ago
  > But even here all the reviews for the tens of different editions are simply mingled together This isn't just books. There are product pages that cover multiple different models with all the reviews and ratings mashed together, even though the models have essentially nothing to do with each other. Like different sizes of Samsung phone but the different sizes have entirely different motherboards/screen techs/cpus/memory.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    For many products there is a way to separate out the reviews, although it is not obvious how to do it: Click the "nnn customer ratings" to get to the review section. In the barchart on the left, click any of the "n star" or "nn%" links. Above the reviews will be a row of dropdown lists, which may include "All formats" or "All styles" or the like. There you can select the individual product variation. You can also change the "n star only" to "All stars" to get all the reviews for that variation. Unfortunately this doesn't work for the book being discussed here.
woofie11 6y ago
Amazon is getting overrun by scams. They're behind eBay and Aliexpress at this point. I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff. There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams. Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control, their brand value will go to nothing.
- Someone 6y ago
  Reading https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/ https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/, it seems having lots of scammy, poorly formatted copied content isn’t a recent problem. What may be new is that this takes copyrighted material.
- OneLeggedCat 6y ago
  I'm sure they're watching this closely. But for now, scams are still more profitable for them than cracking down on those scams. A moderate amount of impact to brand value is always acceptable to near-monopolies.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    They aren't a near monopoly though. They have about 49% of the eCommerce market. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... It's gone up since I last checked, but that's not a monopoly. They're just the most consolidated block. You can downvote but 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of ecomm is not anywhere close to a classical monopoly.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      Why focus so much on the word? People reach for one of the few common words we have for “badly-behaved corporation” to express their criticism of Amazon practices, not by hawkishly watching market share graphs until one line gets too high. Maybe there is a better word, but the problems people experience are still there and are still real.
nomadrat 6y ago
I even saw somewhere an article on topic "how to make money duplicating books for Kindle". Was presented like it's something legitimate. My 5 cents - reading a books on CS topics requires a lot of notes making and working with this notes on kidnle is the worst.
acabal 6y ago
Copyright infringement aside, I always tell people that the Kindle ecosystem (from their crappy who-cares approach to their store catalog, to the crappy software in their Kindle products) is a complete disaster. Shoddy formatting is the norm and is only encouraged by the Kindle's shoddy renderer and file format. Amazon may have kickstarted the ereading device boom, but Kindles surely don't deserve to be as popular as they are any more, especially with a tech-savvy crowd like HN. Other alternatives exist that are much, much better. Anyone who cares about books at all should purchase a device that has native epub support and a good epub renderer. (I.e., not Adobe Digital Editions.) Kobo is a very good option that ticks those boxes, though other alternatives exist. The native iOS Books app on iPad is probably the top tier of native epub renderers though that's obviously not an eink option.
- amoe_ 6y ago
  Is it possible to satisfy these criteria with non-Kindle ebook options? * Good book selection, including more obscure and older books. * Highlighting and notes automatically get backed up somewhere off-device. * Paperwhite-sized backlit e-ink device. I would really love to move off Kindle but AFAIK nothing else can satisfy these yet.
  - acabal 6y ago
    Kobo. I have a Kobo Aura One from several years ago that does all of that. Book selection in their store is subjective but you can side-load any epub file very easily.
    - guitarbill 6y ago
      The Kobo Aura One seems discontinued. They have a Kobo Nia, but it looks seems terrible (just like the entry-level Kindle). The Kobo Clara is $120 [0], so that's the one going up against the Paperwhite. I'm ashamed to admit I've never considered using a Kobo, but looking into it, damn. The Kobo's lighting color is adjustable, so no more of that garish blue light. And it supports ePUB files natively. The bezel seems a lot thinner. The only feature it's lacking is it isn't waterproof. Meanwhile, the Kobo Libra H2O is $170, and is waterproof, has page-turn buttons, and a larger screen. Since I usually strip DRM (getting harder to do), and even sometimes edit eBooks to strip out the shite publishers add to it (like reading samples for other books, I mean WTF), the ePUB support would be extremely useful. [0] https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-clara-hd https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-...
geogra4 6y ago
I've been purchasing pc parts from ebay and honestly I've found it at least as reliable and with better prices to boot.
paultopia 6y ago
How does this happen though? Like, policing counterfeit physical products in an environment full of third-party sellers is actual work, because you have to somehow figure out how to inspect or filter a bunch of actual things from many, many, people. By contrast, there aren't that many sizeable publishing houses in the world. Manning obviously isn't huge, but they aren't tiny either. They've been around for over 25 years, they have hundreds of titles---they're at least a medium-sized, serious, commercial press. And Amazon has been in the book industry for forever. So: how hard would it really be to maintain a list of authorized agents for serious, commercial presses, and not sell e-books for works currently in print from those presses, unless the person selling them is one of those agents, or can prove that the e-book is authorized/in the public domain? This does not seem hard at all. Like, not even a little bit. Hell, I'd go so far as to call it easy.
lovehashbrowns 6y ago
Awesome, another scam to worry about on Kindle. Kindle is already worthless for browsing technical books, anyway. So many of the titles on there tend to be low-effort books that get higher placing than legitimate titles. The rest of Amazon is fraught with scams. For example, I will never ever purchase cologne, hair, or skincare products from Amazon because there are so many fakes. Browse some of the reviews from people that experience things like hair falling out or chemical burns, and then they find out they received a bootleg product even when they use "Ships from Amazon." Amazon is getting increasingly useless for shopping.

170 points by WoodenChair 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago

Sounds about like the physical products on Amazon these days.

Wistar 6y ago
This. I have to be so careful about making sure who it is that is the actual vendor. Amazon used to clearly state that a product was "sold and fulfilled by amazon" but I don't see that anymore.
- bb101 6y ago
  I've read that Amazon warehouses mix every vendor's products with the same UPC code into the same box. If that's true, then it's pot luck whether you receive a legitimate or fake product.

matsemann 6y ago

> There is literally a poorly formatted pirated version of my book on the Amazon Kindle store accumulating 1 and 2 star reviews for its poor formatting that count against all editions. So not only do they commingle physical items so you never know what you get. They also allow other people's products to affect your rating.

Shacklz 6y ago
That struck me as especially egregious; even if the e-book-version was legitimate, why on earth would anyone think that merging these reviews is a good idea? Some tech books are, in my opinion, terrible for e-book without adjustments and vice versa (e.g., description on left page and corresponding picture on right page might work quite well in a paper book but not in an ebook where you see only one page at a time); why would these ever be merged? Is this a normal thing on Amazon? Speaking as someone who never ordered anything from Amazon as it barely services my country
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  I don't work at Amazon, but worked at a similar (European, national) retailer: You really have to walk the line between ratings-per-SKU and aggregate ratings sometimes. In an ideal world, the reading experience of a Kindle book is the same as the physical book. So someone might argue that ratings should be aggregated across all version of the product. Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance. Similarly, do you really want people to leave ratings on a black shirt in size L, and that rating not apply to all sizes and colors? I assume someone at Amazon thinks about this, and the defaults (fashion => merge, books => merge, electronics => donotmerge) etc. do OK until complaints come in. There's no profit in not being heavy-handed.
  - WoodenChair 6y ago
    > In an ideal world, the reading experience of a Kindle book is the same as the physical book. So someone might argue that ratings should be aggregated across all version of the product. Would you expect different ratings for hardcover/paperback versions of books? Probably not, at least assuming people review the content of the book, not its appearance. Right, the issue though is that there is a much larger gulf between the eBook and print book than there is between the paperback and hardcover. And the delivery mechanism can greatly affect your enjoyment of the book. It's about more than just appearance. Source code in particular, does not often work well on a Kindle's tiny screen.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Although maybe it does if you read it on a full-size tablet. In general, I mostly avoid buying books I know aren't 95% text in Kindle format unless they're very cheap or are from a known publisher for things like guidebooks. They can work well but it's definitely hit or miss. (I also just don't like ebooks for certain types of references where I want to stick post-its etc.)
    - ThePadawan 6y ago
      I personally fully agree! But I imagine a PM at Amazon was presented with the question "Should ratings of all versions of books be merged?". Unless they really really cared (or personally had experienced dramatic differences between versions of books before), they probably said "Yeah sure". (I'm also biased a bit in that I assume that implementing this more fine-grained would cost more than $0).
tzs 6y ago
You used to be able to at least hit the link to see all reviews. The all reviews filtering options included one to filter by format. This helped a lot. I don't see that anymore. Also, on the reviews themselves it used to state what format a given review was for. I don't see that anymore either. So...it looks like Amazon deliberately decided to make it harder to tell if the Kindle edition is good or not.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Review filtering is still available for many products, see my note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24400210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24400210 for how to get there. Unfortunately it's not available for this book. (You can filter by star rating but not by edition.)

bzb5 6y ago

Maybe you should’ve made a Kindle edition yourself if you didn’t want an automated crappy version to show.

waihtis 6y ago

This is just a core component of Amazon's business model which can best be characterized as "intentional oversight", where little effort is made against illegitimate users and scenarios if they bring in revenue for them. It has been true for a very long time in many different scenarios, including physical piracy and (via hearsay) lax credit card validation policies.

my123 6y ago
> lax credit card validation policies However, if you try to pay through a bank account (at least in Germany), it's an utter pain. Same with Maestro debit cards...
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  That’s because you have consumer protection laws putting Amazon on the hook if that use was unauthorized.
- amaccuish 6y ago
  I tried this the other day since amazon.de kept bugging me about it. But what's the point. Like is it cheaper for Amazon than Mastercard? If I pay with my mastercard I get a notification instantly and the money disappears. With SEPA-Lastschrift it takes ages and makes budgeting difficult.
gruez 6y ago
>and (via hearsay) lax credit card validation policies. Is that really a problem? AFAIK in card not present transactions (aka. buying stuff online), the merchant is eating the cost of chargebacks.
- waihtis 6y ago
  I dont know enough to confidently comment, but at the time the approach was clearly distinct from everyone else in the market

guiambros 6y ago

This sucks: "It's crazy that @Amazon has allowed this. There is literally a poorly formatted pirated version of my book on the Amazon Kindle store accumulating 1 and 2 star reviews for its poor formatting that count against all editions." I enjoyed the book (paper copy, purchased from Manning), so this prompted me to leave an official review.

WoodenChair 6y ago
Thank you for your support!

ffpip 6y ago

How is Amazon allowed to advertise Kindle so much beside every book on the website? Isn't it anti competitive? Whenever you click on a book, it defaults to the Kindle version. When you change it to the paperback edition, you are faced with banners on all 4 sides saying 'Kindle is good, fast and easy', etc etc

DharmaPolice 6y ago
Probably but you're on their site at this stage, buying from them. Yes, they are pushing you to a product that (I assume) has a margin higher profit margin, but this is not like a neutral product comparison site.

mellosouls 6y ago

For anybody who would like to sample this interesting sounding book, there appears to be substantial preview contents available on the publisher's site with a nice audio version as well. I don't know the limitations; it appears to be constrained by viewport access only (ie. you can read it all without signing in but not offline; it scrambles text when you scroll). Example: https://livebook.manning.com/book/classic-computer-science-problems-in-python/chapter-4 https://livebook.manning.com/book/classic-computer-science-p... Nice presentation work by Manning/Livebook.

null_object 6y ago

This has become a really serious problem buying any sort of Kindle book these days. I got very tired of the OCR-created classic books that are sold with poor formatting, spelling errors and sometimes even remnants of the conversion process left in the text, so I always really carefully search for specific publishers, for instance "Jane Austen Sanditon Penguin English Library" (or similar). But even here all the reviews for the tens of different editions are simply mingled together - including people complaining about torn paperback covers, and random editions that are stolen from Project Gutenberg and sold for profit on Amazon, as well as some that are simply gibberish and seem to have been run through Google-translate. That particular edition above even links to the wrong item from the search. So sad that Amazon don't even care about their Kindle book inventory any longer: this is an area where they could easily guarantee authenticity and quality - if they could give a shit.

ghaff 6y ago
>random editions that are stolen from Project Gutenberg and sold for profit on Amazon, Most of what is on Project Gutenberg is public domain so it's not being "stolen." If it's a simple copy and paste with no added value and it's being sold, that's a bit slimy but it's not stealing.
nebulous1 6y ago
> But even here all the reviews for the tens of different editions are simply mingled together This isn't just books. There are product pages that cover multiple different models with all the reviews and ratings mashed together, even though the models have essentially nothing to do with each other. Like different sizes of Samsung phone but the different sizes have entirely different motherboards/screen techs/cpus/memory.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  For many products there is a way to separate out the reviews, although it is not obvious how to do it: Click the "nnn customer ratings" to get to the review section. In the barchart on the left, click any of the "n star" or "nn%" links. Above the reviews will be a row of dropdown lists, which may include "All formats" or "All styles" or the like. There you can select the individual product variation. You can also change the "n star only" to "All stars" to get all the reviews for that variation. Unfortunately this doesn't work for the book being discussed here.

woofie11 6y ago

Amazon is getting overrun by scams. They're behind eBay and Aliexpress at this point. I kind of feel like they need to adopt a labor-intensive zero-tolerance policy for this kind of stuff. There's a bimodal distribution. You can have a few scams, throw a ton of resources at each (to the point of prosecution, etc.) to deter that number from growing. Or you can have a huge number of scams. Amazon just swung over to the other side, and if they don't get it under control, their brand value will go to nothing.

Someone 6y ago
Reading https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/ https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/, it seems having lots of scammy, poorly formatted copied content isn’t a recent problem. What may be new is that this takes copyrighted material.
OneLeggedCat 6y ago
I'm sure they're watching this closely. But for now, scams are still more profitable for them than cracking down on those scams. A moderate amount of impact to brand value is always acceptable to near-monopolies.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  They aren't a near monopoly though. They have about 49% of the eCommerce market. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... It's gone up since I last checked, but that's not a monopoly. They're just the most consolidated block. You can downvote but 5% of the entire retail market and 49% of ecomm is not anywhere close to a classical monopoly.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    Why focus so much on the word? People reach for one of the few common words we have for “badly-behaved corporation” to express their criticism of Amazon practices, not by hawkishly watching market share graphs until one line gets too high. Maybe there is a better word, but the problems people experience are still there and are still real.

nomadrat 6y ago

I even saw somewhere an article on topic "how to make money duplicating books for Kindle". Was presented like it's something legitimate. My 5 cents - reading a books on CS topics requires a lot of notes making and working with this notes on kidnle is the worst.

acabal 6y ago

Copyright infringement aside, I always tell people that the Kindle ecosystem (from their crappy who-cares approach to their store catalog, to the crappy software in their Kindle products) is a complete disaster. Shoddy formatting is the norm and is only encouraged by the Kindle's shoddy renderer and file format. Amazon may have kickstarted the ereading device boom, but Kindles surely don't deserve to be as popular as they are any more, especially with a tech-savvy crowd like HN. Other alternatives exist that are much, much better. Anyone who cares about books at all should purchase a device that has native epub support and a good epub renderer. (I.e., not Adobe Digital Editions.) Kobo is a very good option that ticks those boxes, though other alternatives exist. The native iOS Books app on iPad is probably the top tier of native epub renderers though that's obviously not an eink option.

amoe_ 6y ago
Is it possible to satisfy these criteria with non-Kindle ebook options? * Good book selection, including more obscure and older books. * Highlighting and notes automatically get backed up somewhere off-device. * Paperwhite-sized backlit e-ink device. I would really love to move off Kindle but AFAIK nothing else can satisfy these yet.
- acabal 6y ago
  Kobo. I have a Kobo Aura One from several years ago that does all of that. Book selection in their store is subjective but you can side-load any epub file very easily.
  - guitarbill 6y ago
    The Kobo Aura One seems discontinued. They have a Kobo Nia, but it looks seems terrible (just like the entry-level Kindle). The Kobo Clara is $120 [0], so that's the one going up against the Paperwhite. I'm ashamed to admit I've never considered using a Kobo, but looking into it, damn. The Kobo's lighting color is adjustable, so no more of that garish blue light. And it supports ePUB files natively. The bezel seems a lot thinner. The only feature it's lacking is it isn't waterproof. Meanwhile, the Kobo Libra H2O is $170, and is waterproof, has page-turn buttons, and a larger screen. Since I usually strip DRM (getting harder to do), and even sometimes edit eBooks to strip out the shite publishers add to it (like reading samples for other books, I mean WTF), the ePUB support would be extremely useful. [0] https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-clara-hd https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-...

geogra4 6y ago

I've been purchasing pc parts from ebay and honestly I've found it at least as reliable and with better prices to boot.

paultopia 6y ago

How does this happen though? Like, policing counterfeit physical products in an environment full of third-party sellers is actual work, because you have to somehow figure out how to inspect or filter a bunch of actual things from many, many, people. By contrast, there aren't that many sizeable publishing houses in the world. Manning obviously isn't huge, but they aren't tiny either. They've been around for over 25 years, they have hundreds of titles---they're at least a medium-sized, serious, commercial press. And Amazon has been in the book industry for forever. So: how hard would it really be to maintain a list of authorized agents for serious, commercial presses, and not sell e-books for works currently in print from those presses, unless the person selling them is one of those agents, or can prove that the e-book is authorized/in the public domain? This does not seem hard at all. Like, not even a little bit. Hell, I'd go so far as to call it easy.

lovehashbrowns 6y ago

Awesome, another scam to worry about on Kindle. Kindle is already worthless for browsing technical books, anyway. So many of the titles on there tend to be low-effort books that get higher placing than legitimate titles. The rest of Amazon is fraught with scams. For example, I will never ever purchase cologne, hair, or skincare products from Amazon because there are so many fakes. Browse some of the reviews from people that experience things like hair falling out or chemical burns, and then they find out they received a bootleg product even when they use "Ships from Amazon." Amazon is getting increasingly useless for shopping.