That depends on whether he got paid for the first printing of the damaged, returned book, which I don’t think he was. He mentioned in a comment that he got 50 a

That depends on whether he got paid for the first printing of the damaged, returned book, which I don’t think he was. He mentioned in a comment that he got 50 author copies, checked them, and returned the damaged ones. I assume he was not paid for the free author copies..? So if they sold a returned author copy that is known to be damaged then Amazon 1) failed to pay him for a sold book, and 2) broke some kind of rule in their contract where it promises to sell high-quality prints of his book to his readers. Sure, QA is not perfect and problems will happen, but selling a book that is known to be damaged does not count as an honest mistake.