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.
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 $0.01.
As I've lost trust in Amazon, I've started using Ebay for online purchases. Ebay is orders of magnitude more transparent. Transparency is a good way to create trust. It helps that Ebay's business model is not grossly misaligned with my wallet. It helps that the marker of trust is between buyer and seller rather than stars based on customer reviews. A seller with 10,000 transactions and 99% positive rating is a better indicator of an item's quality than 4 stars based on twenty reviews.
I constantly buy / add to my wishlist older hardcover books I'm interested in reading and will come back and check when the used price is low and buy either Like New / Very Good / Good and have been satisfied with the results. Nothing like getting a 800+ page hardcover book with barely any use delivered to your door for 6-10$.
If one is worried about quality don't by anything used that is less than Very Good IMO.
Maybe the merchant is Amazon itself and hence a fairly reliable seller. Maybe the merchant is some other less reliable seller. Maybe the the merchant has the item in stock. Maybe it does not. Maybe the price shown is in the buyer's interest. Maybe it is not the same as someone else might see.
The difference for me, is that in general Ebay has structured its business so as to create little incentive for manipulating individual transactions in an extractive way. As a marketplace, Ebay tends to provide consistent and reliable information to buyers (as well as sellers) regarding price and the transaction history of the counter party.
Now all this is with the caveat that I generally use Ebay as a replacement for Amazon and therefore am not heavily invested in the auction process. Usually the only time a enter an Ebay auction over buy-it-now is when the auction is ending soon and there's not much bid activity and the item is on the long tail...I don't use usually use Ebay to buy high demand or high ticket items via auction.
But again, for me it is that I find Amazon's purchase process is often untrustworthy. Essentially, Amazon's search is broken when measured against my economic interests (and great when measured against Amazon's). In short, Amazon has become an adversarial marketplace where my adversary is the house. Ebay's auctions are adversarial, but I'm not up against the platform and the economics of the transaction for me do not depend on how the platform leaks information...and there are few incentives for Ebay to evolve in that way and many incentives for Amazon to do so.
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%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&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.
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.
product: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013US9FFY
Intertek's statement: http://www.intertek.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=34359...
In Germany I've never had this problem and never heard of others having it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, while arbitrary these barriers have the place till we have movement of people.
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.