There was a post here, a few weeks ago, by an author, complaining that Every. Single. Copy of his book on Amazon was a fake.

Books are ridiculously easy to counterfeit, and can bring in quite a bit of cash.

Amazon has made the conscious business decision to be a counterfeit souk. I guess they make lots of money from it, and I suspect they don’t really care about their retail brand anymore. From what I hear, it’s actually a loss leader.

i thought amazon would dominate and conquer books market but they never got beyond just super basic concept of selling a book online. Finding interesting books is awful, everything is an ad. reading on kindle is ok. i have prime and once or twice a year read a free book on it.

i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.

Well, Amazon used to be ahead. I vividly remember using their "Find me this out-of-print book" service once and being very positively surprised that it actually worked. Signed up for the out-of-print book, got a message about 3 months later, and BANG, there it was, in my mailbox. That was one of the moment when I thought "well, they are really doing a great job" That has changed since, especially since the website design has been fucked up with ads everywhere.

amazon a product manager focused organization in many parts of their business. Person A comes to america to study for masters or mba. A gets hired by amazon. A is under pressure to release features to increase sales or show how their feature is attributed some top or bottom line metric increase. A fears losing job under amazon cut throat culture and will optimize for exactly that. No amazon job means bye bye visa you go home. if you have family, sell everything and move back.

so as you could guess customer benefit is not primary or even second third focus.

company leadership create culture of one incentive. workers output optimizing for that incentive.

You aren't trying to say that foreign workers are responsible for all the problems at Amazon, not the American management? Come on. I dont believe these "the management is innocent" memes.

To add to that, if I'm getting cheap knockoffs (non-books in this example), I might as well get them from Shopee/Lazada etc since they almost invariably cheaper than Amazon.

Potentially silly question, but how can a book be a fake? Do you mean someone copied the title and put their own text? If I order a book, let's say Infinite Jest, I care that the book contains the words that correspond to the novel written by David Foster Wallace. If that is the case, I got what I wanted. I don't really care who printed it or what the cover looks like.

No, you mean you don't care that the author gets paid.

It's not only about you.

(And I know DFW is dead, but he has an estate. And living authors have bills to pay.)

Do you care about the quality of the typesetting? How well bound the book is? What paper was used? Etc.

Do you care about the value of your purchase? If you spend, say, $150 on a scientific textbook, and then you cannot show it in public because you would look like a pirate, you should care.

And that is the best case of a readable, complete book. Maybe you get only the first 500 pages, or the figures are cut off, or it is a degraded scan of a printed book.

The problem is of course much worse for collectible books for which even getting an official reprint or a different edition instead of the real thing would be a problem.

Not silly, morally vacant.

Aside from the issue of the original author not receiving payment, counterfeit books can actually have textual errors as well. A few years ago when the 3rd edition of The Art Of Electronics was published, I saw quite a few warnings posted online not to buy from Amazon. These counterfeits were poorly printed and had many typographical errors, many of which made the information factually incorrect and caused that specific copy to be untrustworthy. So especially for a reference text like that, a counterfeit can actually cause harm if the information isn't correct.

Well, this illustrates the issue that many corporate entities have about open-sourcing their software code.

A book is a bunch of words, delivered to a reader via some medium. In order for a book to work, the words must all be delivered in readable format; whether printed out on a physical media, or delivered electronically, as text strings.

Because of that, copying the text is trivial. I have a scanner, under my desk, that will completely scan a book, if I unbind that book, and drop in the pages. I also have software that will OCR those scans. I have heard of OCR software that does a lot better than mine.

Writing a book is hard. I mean, really hard. I've done it. It can take months for an author to write a book that I can read in a couple of days (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey, or James Patterson).

Software is similar. Once it is written, reproducing it is trivial. After all, it's just a bunch of words. To make it even more convenient, almost all software is already rendered into electronic form.

With both of these, the only thing preventing anyone from simply copying the text, is the law, and there are lots of people (nations, even) that have absolutely no respect at all for the law. They will happily copy and reproduce the text.

It's entirely possible to have counterfeits of higher quality than the original. You could, for instance, sell a fancy, gilt-edged, leather-bound version of a book that has only been released as a mass-market paperback.

But what gives it real value, is the text.

You could steal software that drives a fairly humble Web site, and convert it to drive a megasite, or a design for a limited edition, artisanal product, and turn it into a cheap, mass-market knockoff.

In any of these cases, the originator of the text; whether an author, or a programmer, derives zero gain from it, and it can actually do damage to them, as the knockoffs could have real problems, and do brand damage, or the fake book could be published with the seal of the real publisher, and that publisher could see reputational damage, if the book contains textual errors (like lots of OCR'd books do).

It's a fairly big topic, and there are organizations that are dedicated to either freeing up artistic copyright, or overenforcing it.

The basic deal, is that, if you want art, you need to compensate the artist enough to make that art. AI might be at the point where that art could be faked, but I'm not sure if we are really there, or this is all a bunch of hype.

Fakes, bad paper quality and shipping damage (esp. for hardcover books which lose a lot of their value when damaged)

I ordered a paperback a couple years ago. Kundera, not a completely obscure book. The page on Amazon showed a Harper Perennial paperback with the squiggly line drawing cover art like I was expecting.

What I received looked like the cover head been designed in Word. Solid red, some generic oil painting print, and black text. The contents of the book was even worse. It looked like it was printed on a dot matrix or something.

Needless to say I returned it and have not bought a book from Amazon since.

I bought a $200 control theory textbook from Amazon. The cover was correct. The inside was a veterinary medicine textbook by a different publisher.

That sounds like a printers error that could happen in any store.

Pirated copies have become a thing.

Splotchy hard to read type, low quality paper and binding, poorly aligned text, rough edges from blunt cutting, weird cover possibly in a different language, and the knowledge that the authors aren't getting money from your purchase.