<<< An Amazon spokeswoman denied that counterfeiting of books was a problem, saying, “This report cites a handful of complaints, but even a handful is too many and we will keep working until it’s zero.” The company said it strictly prohibited counterfeit products and last year denied accounts to more than one million suspected “bad actors.”
“There is strong competition amongst booksellers, from major retailers to independent booksellers,” the spokeswoman added. >>>
This is a BIG, BALD-FACED LIE!! They do nothing to stop the author mills that throw books up left and right in Kindle Unlimited and fill the upper page-ranks constantly. We're talking books that are either double-spaced through the whole bloody thing, or double spaces between paragraphs all to boost the page count they get paid for. On top of that, a LOT of those author mills plagiarize constantly, just like the medical and programming books.
Then their Montlake publisher arm is nothing but a conflict of interest where they preference to that side of the business by boosting their authors.
Amazon is nothing but bots and algorithms, and running rough shod or everyone, not just authors. It's time they were broken up, although that's not going to happen anytime in the next 1.5 yrs or longer if the GOP maintains control of the DOJ
23
I wont buy printer ink or laptop batteries from Amazon because I cannot tell authentic products from knockoffs. I don't mind their selling cheap immitations. I just want to know what I'm getting.
14
Imho, life was better before Amazon.
24
Amazon has become so successful because they sell the ultimate American addiction: convenience. But as this article very clearly illustrates, that convenience carries a price tag.
But the same technology that makes Amazon so successful also allows its competitors (at least in the book-selling space) to be just as convenient, if not as omniscient. And with fewer negative side effects.
For those bemoaning the demise of the independent bookstore, may I suggest ABEbooks.com - an online co-op venture where independent bookstores can list their inventory in a single website? The combined inventory of these hundreds, perhaps thousands, of book shops is pretty vast. I've yet to be stumped, even when looking for somewhat obscure titles.
13
Amazon should be broken up. There's the retail store and there's everything else: cloud, Alexa, Kindle.
7
The publisher I work for recently bought counterfeit copies of one of our titles from a third party seller on Amazon. When we presented Amazon with the evidence, they blocked them.
But that's one seller for one title. Nothing to stop that seller from re-appearing under a different name. And what about all the other sellers on Amazon of counterfeit books for all our other titles?
Amazon plays a passive role while publishers play the biggest game of wack-a-mole. And it's not like we have anything else to do, right?
17
And if you think this is a problem (it is), think about who's overseeing nuclear weapon facilities.
9
I've made test purchases through Amazon of material that I published myself, which showed up on other vendors, and I never got paid for it. Still wondering, where the money went? Getting a response from Amazon is like pulling teeth. I'm done with these giant monstrosities. It's just as easy to promote your own online shop as it is to promote their webpage. And you get to keep the 40% they take for doing next to nothing, just providing a webpage and handling the transaction. PayPal can handle the transaction. You can open your own webpage. "Own the pipe and the content." Best advice I ever heard.
24
Reading all these comments about criminal fraud being perpetrated by vendors using Amazon as a storefront, and that Amazon benefits from the percentage they get on each transaction, how can Amazon not be an accomplice to those crimes, and criminally culpable?
26
Maybe this is too simple, but why not let anyone whose work has been counterfeited and sold on Amazon sue the purveyor of the counterfeit, namely Amazon. I'll bet they would find a way to clean up their act pretty quickly.
34
Sounds like the morals behind the Chinese business model are corrupting American business. Don't read about the remedies here, but copyright laws obviously need tightening. Does Amazon have so much political clout that it can prohibit such legislative considerations, or would it venture to publicly oppose them?
11
I recently bought 2 books off of Amazon for my 13 year old. One was written by a YouTuber who has a channel about language, word origins,history etc.
It was so riddled with spelling,grammatical and usage errors I took it away from him.
It was as if no one edited it at all.
I called the publisher and they said “oh yeah we had some editing problems we’ll send you a new one. 6 months later no new one.
I also purchased the CIA 2018-2019 almanac listing every country in the world with their demographic profiles.
One problem; the entire country of Japan was missing.
Again contacted that publisher they rep said “ what’s your email, I’ll PDF you the chapter on Japan” ????!
What am I supposed to do with that staple it into the book?
This can become very dangerous. We’re going to get jacked up on prices soon on top of sloppy presentation with facts dropped or added for that matter.
Facts and truth are already escaping our grasp these situations are not going to help.
26
We are the owners of a company that hold a number of patents for various products. Our original patented product, a wine cap to reseal a bottle of wine, has been counterfeited nearly 200 times on Amazon and continues to be counterfeited daily despite our holding the patent and our regular complaints to them about infringement. Amazon seems to have no interest in stopping the counterfeits yet we have to spend hours finding them and reporting them to Amazon to take them down. This process is long and tedious and Amazon do not make it easy. We have lost a lot of income to these counterfeits over the years.
The counterfeit product page even have reviews so they have been on Amazon long enough to garner reviews.
As a small business owner we know we have to play in the Amazon sandbox but the amount of time it requires is crippling. Amazon should be held accountable for all the sales they made from the counterfeits and the owner of the patent should be reimbursed - maybe then they would verify the products on their site. I am hoping articles like this will raise awareness and help change the situation but I seriously doubt it will.
40
Amazon's march to control all of retail started with publishing. I worked in publishing for decades and we were Amazon's first victims. I avoid buying anything from them.
13
Google’s mantra was not to be evil; Amazon’s seems to be the opposite. They’ve bullied the publishing industry. They’ve subjected low-level workers and top executives to awful conditions. And they lure third-party sellers on their platform, see what their bestsellers are and then start selling them at prices that the third-party seller can’t compete with. It so doesn’t surprise me that they have zero ethics around counterfeits on their platform. I’m with Elizabeth Warren on breaking up Amazon.
28
This seems similar to the perspective Napster took, arguing Napster was simply a platform for peer-to-peer sharing of media files, and took a hands off approach to copyright infringement by the platform participants with an implied good faith approach. Amazon as a platform for selling any goods with a hands off approach to managing counterfeit goods feels like a similar approach as Napster. A good legal team could use the precedents set from that Napster as well as the established legal copyrights for books to change Amazon's tune.... Amazon would be well-served to become proactive in this space.
9
Amazon is ripping off authors left and right and needs to be held 100% responsible, just as any shop owner would be responsible if they sold counterfeit goods. The FBI needs to get involved, because the sale of counterfeit goods like handbags and sneakers often funds terrorism. I believe ebay was sued by Louis Vuitton and Tiffany for the sale of fakes and I believe both companies won their lawsuits. I could be wrong, but something needs to be done now.
21
I shared this article with a friend and she pointed out a blog post from 2013 about how Amazon was selling counterfeit goods way back then.
http://blog.brandisty.com/brand-management-blog/amazon-s-counterfeit-goods-problem
Why is it that Amazon gets to sell fake stuff but Macys doesn't get to sell fake Gucci or Louis Vitton? As I'm learning more and more each day, our laws are just a joke.
21
Be vigilant and beware of any person, company, and government controlling a large segment of production, media, land, and government. Or, we will be slaves to a few or worse.
5
What Amazon is doing is no different that if Barnes and Noble were selling counterfeit books on their shelves. Surely, we have agencies in the country to deal with such stuff...unless we are dealing with the richest man on earth.
If you click on Facebook or buy from Amazon you do so knowing full well what is going on.
Here is a thought. How about when a person acquires a billion dollars we quit doing business with them and make them retire giving someone else a chance to make a billion? Does Howard Schultz need any more money from me? No, which is why I go to the mom and pop stores in town which not only have better coffee but the latest shtick is bikini baristas. Imagine Cher in her Battleship Missouri outfit leaning out the drive thru window asking if you want cream...or sugar with your coffee.
Quit giving billionaires your money and your life will improve. Well, at least your morning mocha will improve.
10
And it’s not just fakes of the books Amazon profits off of its also in fakes/bad copies of famous brands of skin care, foods, etc
Despicable greedy pigs.
10
I don’t think these people (article writers and publishers) have any idea about what they’re talking about. On a regular basis there are completely ludicrous articles published on other popular sites such as CNBC, Money, ABC detailing people grossing millions of dollars reselling clearance items from Walmarts! These writers don’t do their homework and seem to take the words of sketchy people (trying to sell expensive courses claiming they’re making a fortune selling on Amazon) as the truth. This is really getting out of hand because smart people like my physician end up thinking crazy stuff like this is possible.
There are over 58 million books on Amazon and theres no chance that Amazon can police every book sold on their website. These book publishers make it seem like they’re getting ripped off when other sellers are selling used copies of their books. For most textbooks, third party sellers are not able to list the books as new. I seriously doubt a book publisher could order 35 copies of books and 30 of them be fake. If a single customer complains about an items authenticity (even if it is just a competing seller) the accused seller is banned from selling the item until they provide an appeal and invoices (in my experience). These book publishers just want to continue ripping off young adults by charging ludicrous amounts of money for slightly updated books over the years.
4
How do you verify without a doubt that something, anything is genuine? This problem has existed for thousands of years. What is different now is that there is actually a way to 'mark' a product as genuine. Print an encrypted QR code on the book. A smart phone application could validate the QR code with the publisher of the book. Each book has a unique QR code. If an attempt was made to validate a 2nd copy of the book with an identical QR code then there would be a notification that this book had been validated before 'N' number of times, and therefore it was a used book or a counterfeit book.
3
I love the ability on Amazon to download a free sample of an ebook to see if I want to order it. Especially because I don’t trust the reader reviews. But if I’m buying a face cream or lipstick or toaster, I often go directly to the manufacturers. Too many instances of fake cosmetics on Amazon, for instance. And I would love to find every book I want at my public library but it just isn’t possible.
1
It's not just books.
Numerous times I've read reviews on Amazon's website that claim that the buyer received counterfeit merchandise of low quality.
8
This is really silly. In philosophy, this might be referred to as a "category mistake." This issue has nothing to do with monopoly power. Why are people asking Amazon to police these crimes? You know who polices crime? The police. Uh-huh. We have local police, the FBI, agencies like the FTC, and our court systems. Why aren't you knocking on their doors, instead of Amazon's? The next category mistake is thinking law enforcement can't do it because they don't have the budget. Of course they don't. But Amazon effectively does. Amazon's annual profit is about $10 billion.
2
Amazon is complicit because they obfuscate the identity of the counterfeit sellers. Manufacturers would be thrilled to pursue these criminals, on their own time and at their own expense, but Amazon won't provide any identifying details to manufacturers, even if a customer reports a counterfeit and uploads photos showing the fake products. Amazon also will not share any customer contact information so a manufacturer can lean more or even make a customer whole in an effort to redeem their brand.
10
@Lady Edith
Very well said! Could not laws be made to force disclosure by Amazon? Aren't there many such laws in other areas of commerce? Corporations exist to make money, governments exist to regulate corporations. We need remedies. The question is where to go for them.
4
It's not just the books on Amazon that are counterfeit. I have worked my entire career in the housewares industry. A major problem now faced by manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers in this sector is counterfeit housewares products sold on Amazon. I'm sure it exists in virtually all other product categories, as well.
Amazon, even if they cared, can't do anything about it, given their business model and their scale. They've made it too easy for cons and crooks to operate on their "platform" They are the Fakebook for commerce, with an attitude that a so-called platform has no responsibility for what appears on that platform.
If you want to make sure you're getting what you pay for, shop where you can see and touch the product, and where you can return it if you find it deficient.
11
Can I pay Amazon with counterfeit money?
I don’t think so
12
What great timing! I just got off the phone with Amazon support (and you don't call them--they call you). I had ordered a computer keyboard online last week. Amazon took the order, gave me a ship date, and also took my money.
Then today they cancelled the order! When I finally got to a human I was told that it was because the "third party" didn't have it! Amazon also told me they bore no responsibility for the third party and it wasn't their fault that I wasn't told in the first place that the item wasn't available. (I'm not making this up!) Oh, and then they told me that my money would be refunded. Sometime or another.
I hung up. They won.
8
Modest Proposal: each of the members of Amazon's board must serve 1 year in prison for each time they sold a stolen item on their website. By this article, we have a string case for 30 years in prison for each of the board members, I say.
While I joke, if I sold stolen goods, you can bet I would serve time in prison.
4
Many of us are already hip to this. Scammers routinely sell inferior fakes at a fraction of what the retail price is. Other scammers hope you will accidentally click what should be a $12 item for $1200! When almost anything from anywhere can be shipped quickly to you, Amazon’s value add is virtually nonexistent.
2
I stopped buying anything from Amazon years ago and don’t miss it one bit. I discovered Indie Bound, and that’s who gets my on line book business. I go to Joseph Beth’s when I need a special gift. I don’t need a “smart home”, the one I have does everything I need without someone collecting every bit of meta-data about my existence. Jeff Bezos has managed to convince the majority of the US that we need this service, when we just don’t.
8
Stop buying from Amazon! Simple solution...
15
Before we clobber Amazon we need to recognize that it also is very valuable to some. I live in the sticks and dont have access to a major library or top-flight book store. If I want to get a scholarly or technical book, when I google the title Amazon is often the only source I can find. Amazon excels in helping product areas (like scholarly books) with "long tail" distributions.
3
I will chose to buy from eBay rather than Amazon. I have never had a problem with eBay since first buying from them in 2004.
3
I don’t buy anything on Amazon. I go to the local bookstore of which my location has several. I also don’t buy routine things that have to be delivered. I go to the mall or store to buy things. I like talking to sales people or touching the merchandise.
Amazon is big because people CHOOSE to use them. Amazon was not FORCED on anyone. Same with social media.
Freedom means freedom to not choose as well.
7
@Practical Thoughts - lol, go to the store and try and find a worker who a) speaks my language b) who has any idea what they sell in their store.
Recent example. I went online to Lowes looking for a product. The site said my local store had 17 on aisle 94 so off I went. When I got to the store I could not find an aisle over 55 so I stopped the first person in an apron. I told him what I was looking for but he had no idea what I was talking about. He took me to another person in an apron standing in front of a computer who affirmed that they had no aisle 94. When I was asked again what I was looking for, the second fellow told the first fellow that that item was sold in his department. Back we went to the department and neither could find the item. So, I went home, ordered it online to be picked-up at the store and as soon as they opened I got an email that they had it. When I went to pick it up, the poor gal literally looked through every bin on the shelves three times before finding it. Apparently, Lowes employs the 3 Stooges.
So, 2 trips to the store and talking to three different employees just to purchase a grease pencil. I had a similar experience at Home Depot trying to find the same item. I asked the front desk where to find a grease pencil. The gal looked on her website and could not find anything. She thought I had the wrong term and asked another guy what they were really called and where they might be. He told me they were in hardware...not
5
Book orders on Amazon should go directly to the official author/publisher arrangement and be mailed by them. Plus, it’s always astounding to see a $10 book being offered for $100 by some dubious reseller. Amazon should have software that catches such ridiculous extremes.
1
It is pretty simple. If amazon publishes a counterfeit that infringes the authors copyright they are guilty of copyright infringement and the penalties are deliberately punitive. Amazon is not above the law. Make Amazon pay the copyright infringement penalties, as any publisher must, and they will soon decide to be more careful.
15
I am in grad school to become a nurse practitioner and several of the medical texts I wanted to buy seemed suspicious enough I opted to skip purchasing--the Sanford Guide in particular stands out. Amazon and other used book retailers are important for students trying to afford medical texts that frequently cost $100 or more. I try to save money and purchase them used but then I run the risk of these counterfeit books that could endanger my patients and my license--it's scary. If amazon is going to sell medical texts I think it has a responsibility to do basic quality control to make sure they are selling legitimate products. It's a public safety issue, especially with these point of care decision guides like the Sanford Guide.
19
What a tidal wave of venom. If I had gotten a heads-up on this article before it was printed I would have loaded up on stock from torch and pitchfork companies.
1
Sure, Amazon should do more to prevent their platform from being used to sell counterfeit goods, if only to preserve their own reputation . And sure, some regulation would probably nudge them in the right direction.
But at the end of the day, isn’t interstate commerce involving counterfeit goods exactly the sort of thing the FBI is supposed to investigate and prosecute? Unlike the guys selling fake Rolodexes on a street corner, these criminals should be fairly easy to track down. After all, Amazon doesn’t hand them a wad of cash. They have to have real bank accounts to receive their ill-gotten booty, don’t they?
Perhaps Mr. Streitfeld could talk to the FBI about this, and write a follow up article. I’d like to know what the FBI is doing about this, and how successful they’ve been.
By the way, if the answer is that these criminals are all based in countries that won’t cooperate with US law enforcement, then we’re back to regulation.
9
Let us not forget the cozy oligopolies of US publishing before Amazon. The arbitrary setting of price points, the buyback agreements, and yes, the cruel treatment of authors. We have gotten into a situation that is partly monopoly, partly Wild West. From the point of view of the buying public, it's plus ca change.
3
Could the authors sue Amazon?
3
I wonder about this. Is there a class action suit in the making?
1
It is not just books. I have found that many of the food products I have sought were not at all what their headline and ad said they were. Be careful, be very careful. If a food product does not show it labeling, including its ingredients, as required by FDA or USDA, the odds are 99-1 that it is a fraud.
3
I am not surprised that Amazon is in denial about the counterfeit goods. Once can know that a merchandise is counterfeit just by looking at the packaging. In the last couple of months we have received counterfeit hearing aid batteries, a Hamilton Beach steam iron, and a book. The best solution is to boycott Amazon and start shopping the old fashion way They have become arrogant and careless since they have driven so many small enterprises out of business thus increasing their profit margin. I don't see the point of driving small business to extinction. since Amazon's profit margin is so large that they don't have to be so greedy and cruel. They are also competing with postal services and FedEx now delivering packages during Christmas.
9
As someone who cherishes bookstores (and who makes a point to visit some regardless of what city I’m in), Amazon’s approach to books is revolting.
Their brick-and-mortar sites in NYC are “hollow,” selling nothing you haven’t heard of. There’s no chance of getting lost in the stacks while devouring some unfamiliar title, or of bumping into a member of some niche fandom you share. There’s hardly any “there,” there.
Sadly, it looks like their online bookstore is no different. I love tech, and program computers for a living, but not all aspects of human life can be efficiently “disrupted.”
15
No bricks and mortar retailer would get away with selling counterfeit products that infringe on intellectual property rights for long. But Amazon shields its marketplace sellers from accountability, and feels no responsibility to do anything but generate revenue on every transaction. Customers are defrauded, legitimate businesses suffer, and content creators are cheated. A sheriff is long overdue in this Wild West sphere of commerce.
11
You want Amazon to POLICE selling books? Are you out of your mind??
That is the very LAST thing in the world Amazon should be doing. Let the FBI and other agencies authorized to police to do the job of counterfeit books and notify sellers like Amazon. As for quality, caveat emptor.
@BillG
Nonsense. Every business is responsible for what they sell. Otherwise, using your model of responsibility, every business can sell whatever they want without any repercussion just by saying, "It's not up to us".
You want to fly in an airplane or drive in a car with fake parts/software? Want to eat food full of toxic chemicals? Want to take life-saving medicine that will do nothing for you - all so a business doesn't have to do their duty? Of course you don't, or shouldn't.
12
Amazon polices other categories. DVD’s are one example
5
Russia, if your listening would you please shut down Amazons website for a few months please.
6
Amazon has had fraud problems for years, and they're just getting worse as they become more of a monopoly. They exploit legitimate third-party sellers, and do nothing to prevent frauds. I self-published a technology book through Amazon in mid-2015 and within months reviewers started complaining about poor print quality. Amazon did nothing when I complained about the print quality. Their customer service has been going downhill for years. It's a monopoly that has to be broken.
6
Not so psyched that Amazon seems poised to have the same effect on the food industry through their ownership of Whole Foods. Selection and quality already down. Niche brands increasingly eliminated to make room for store brand generics. Prices still high though. At least there are still a few co-ops. Not so easy to suss out options for books with so many other retailers shuttered. Hard to make it through a day in Seattle with grumbling about Bezos.
7
@Lisa - "Hard to make it through a day in Seattle with grumbling about Bezos."
:)) Or his arch nemesis, Kshama Sawant.
@tom harrison
I grumble about her less. But City Council does create so many opportunities for a good grumble.
This is a serious problem across all product types on Amazon. AMZ has no incentive to police counterfeits and all forms of IP infringement, so they don't. Last month, one of our products went viral; our Amazon listing was hijacked by counterfeiters and numerous complaint filings to Amazon were deflected. Counterfeit goods went out to customers for nearly 2 weeks and Amazon only addressed the situation when Wired magazine published a story (5/31/19) about our experience. Now, our product listing is flooded with negative reviews from customers who received counterfeit goods. Again, Amazon is slow (at best) to address. Additionally, when we asked if they would contact all the customers who ordered counterfeit product (a simple digital trail) to alert them to the issue, there was no response. Amazon doesn't just not care about the brands or authors being ripped off, it would seem they don't care about their customers being defrauded either.
16
The laissez-faire attitude of Amazon towards counterfeits normalize immoral behavior that most cheats authors and deceive online customers. That same laissez-faire attitude is all the more dangerous and lethal to online consumers if and when Amazon turns a blind eye to selling counterfeit consumable merchandise, foods, and drugs. The question is, Are there procedures in place within and without Amazon to protect the public from fake foods and drugs?
7
Perhaps the answer lies in growing numbers of people refusing to use technologies that sell them garbage, steal their personal information or spy on their activities. While it might be “easier” to never leave the house, order everything through amazon, only have community through Facebook and ask google to dim the lights and set the alarm...
Imagine a world where we walked to the local bookstore, conversed with well informed booksellers, interacted with our neighbors and got off the couch to turn on music or dim the lights. That does not sound so terrifying.
7
@Truthtalk - lol, I would be happy at this point to walk into a store and find someone who was not on the phone that actually knew anything about what was sold in their store.
As for interacting with my neighbors? Most speak English as a second language and the conversations are very limited and often times require one of their kids to translate. The deepest conversation I have had in months now was when a couple of Mormon Missionaries showed up at my door.
1
And then there is Audible, owned by Amazon.
Imagine someone reading a biography of Karl Marx which mentions numerous German terms but the reader knows no German and manages to mangle every word.
Or a book on the life of Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism ( Stranger in a strange land), where the reader cannot even pronounce the first name of the subject of the biography. He calls him Gers- home.
Then there is the reader of the biography of Steve Jobs who mispronounces the word Marin as in Marin County ( he calls it MAR - in county).
These are inexcusable and truly destroy the listening experience for anyone with a brain.
All the spawn of Amazon.
Readers complain in their reviews but I see no evidence that Amazon cares.
Clearly, Amazon has other priorities than improving their products.
And these are just a few
16
I would hope that Amazon sees the dangers inherent in its dominance as a national and international bookseller and will hire a large number of people for good paying jobs designed to ferret out the fakes and forgeries and ensure that quality and strict editorial standards are being followed.
4
Maybe it's an American thing, but here in Canada if my business knowingly (or even through neglect) sells illegal goods, I'm on the hook for it. Why isn't Amazon?
6
Amazon needs to be regulated. Counterfeit books are only the tip of the iceberg of the Wild West situation. Items that pose direct safety risks to consumers are regularly sold on their platform, and when consumers get hurt by products that Amazon didn’t “directly” sell, Amazon holds no liability. My arm was sliced open by a shower caddy that would never be sold in brick-and-mortar stores because they hold liability for safety risks, but it was sold on Amazon’s website because Amazon doesn’t need to care — it isn’t liable anyway. My only recourse was to write a review talking about my ER visit (among other reviews about similar injuries), and message the seller about how I was seriously injured, to no avail. And yes, the dangerous shower caddy is still sold on Amazon, even with all of the scary “I needed an ER visit and 12 stitches” reviews. There’s no incentive for them to check that their items are safe and non-counterfeit.
13
My sense is that the reign of Bezos is slowly on the decline. This is a man of increasingly divided focus and extravagant personal purchases.
Remember, Amazon is not the first love of Bezos. His first love is Space Exploration. Amazon is merely a means to an end: a way to finance Blue Origin and his profound love of science and scientific exploration at the very frontiers of Discovery.
What is Amazon compared to Blue Origin? Nothing really, just a bunch of boring, robotized warehouses in which hundreds of thousands of working class people are essentially enslaved, working fiendish hours.
Bezos is the anti-Ford. Ford paid all of his employees top dollar and genuinely cared about their well-being. Bezos cares about nothing except himself and his personal ambitions, which extend far beyond Amazon.
One of the principal reasons we have such profound income inequality in this nation is that we have billionaires like Bezos with not even 1% of Ford's heart and compassion for the common worker.
8
@Raphael - Did you see the workplace Bezos built here in Seattle for his workers? Ford never did anything like that.
Big tech seems to want to profit from providing the channel without any of the responsibilities that have historically come from being the steward of said channel. Examples abound: Facebook as a media company, YouTube as a TV network, Amazon as a clearinghouse. Businesses are a lot more scalable and profitable when you push quality control into your customers, but ultimately this seems bad for business and society when we allow these companies to build and maintain monopolistic market positions.
5
It isn't just Amazon, although they are the most successful and "in your face" monopoly. The government no longer seems to care about competition, which is the stimulus to produce more and better products, and also to keep prices down. This is not surprising during the Trump administration (his entire life has been one long attempt to generate even greater wealth and to keep himself and his rich friends free from the "rabble"); many politicians make an appeal to the middle class during the year before an election, but the reality is that support for the middle class has been diminishing since the early 1960s (possibly earlier) and Trump clearly cares about no one who is not staying at one of his overpriced hotels or resorts, or donating large sums to his campaign. The only people supporting him are the wealthy (who had a huge tax cut) and people who get joy out of watching the weapons manufacturers get more wealthy and the underprivileged become even more so. What a travesty!
1
@AJB. Market forces are responsible for whatever we want to call the near-monopolistic situation with big tech companies. I'm a free-market supporter but only to a point, and that point has been reached and breached. You are wrong about the causes having anything in particular to do with the current president ... unless you ate 10 years old and think Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, etc., were founded during his watch.
2
I have stopped buying books or anything else from Amazon in part to stop supporting this monopolistic business model. If I need a book I use the library or I buy it from one of the two remaining brick and mortar bookstores in my area. In general I have reduced my level of consumption. I want to scale down my needs and in general own less "stuff." The planet will benefit.
7
Amazon is a confused mess. I wrote a book back in 2010 and published it through CreateSpace before Amazon bought that company and integrated it. Shortly after the book was listed on Amazon, suddenly my book became available on Amazon with a different ISBN - but an absolute replica -- by a new publisher but at eight times the price. The only difference was the publishing date - which was set to 1895, probably to ensure that it would be in the "public domain."
It took close to a year of extensive documentation and pleading with Amazon's support department and creating copyright claims over and over before Amazon finally de-listed the fake book. Now there is just one - mine.
The other thing that is confusing is that some large sellers with thousands of titles use pricing to "delist" their own books for inventory purposes. That's why you often see prices of $1,000+ for common titles. Apparently it's easier to simply change the price to remove it from inventory lists, than it is to deactivate the listing.
It's chilling to think that Amazon may eventually become our only source of books. Where will the incentive toward qualify be then? This is why it doesn't sound like such a terrible idea to invoke anti-trust actions against the platform.
15
…And in a related story: Yesterday, Apple support told me that Amazon's site is responsible for a lot of malware (not viruses, but it affects performance) getting into your computer. It enters as you chase down the best deal during your searches within the site. (I had some, easily removable with a free dot-org malware remover.)
3
Please, Mr. President, it's time to play hardball with Amazon for its intellectual property theft with a 25% tariff on everything it sells.
3
Amazon doesn’t care about fraudulent activity either. In May, I had my Amex info stolen. All the fraudulent charges were made to buy items on Amazon. After I contacted Amex and had my card changed, I contacted Amazon. I gave them my stolen Amex account number and the amount of each transaction. They saw the transactions and verified that nothing was shipped to any address in my profile and furthermore the transactions were not entered from my account, but they said they couldn’t do anything about it. The activities were criminal, yet they wouldn’t report it. Revenue is revenue to them- criminal or not.
13
The rise of counterfeits is why I stopped purchasing many things on Amazon. I'm not surprised about the books. It's a sprawling marketplace with no guarantee of authenticity. I've received used items from third part sellers that were supposed to be new, including baby items that were likely counterfeit. Amazon has squashed competition by offering low prices but provides zero oversight. There are other options and even ones that will deliver.
4
This is why I've stopped buying from Amazon. Too much of what they push is junk.
6
Amazon has lost its utility for shopping. It's not just that more than half of the stuff on their--books and other items--are counterfit, it's also that the things you want are buried under an endless sea of garbage and fake reviews.
It's nearly impossible to find a good book these days because their are hundreds of self-published garbage novels for every well-edited, well-written book--and Amazon provides no mechanism to distinguish between them.
7
Here’s a thought: stop buying from Amazon! Yes, it’s convenient to order books and anything else online, but haven’t we had enough of Amazon’s monopoly? Stop the flow of money to Bezos!
16
Amazon is dealing with the counterfeiters by sledgehammering ALL publishers associated with a given work- including the original author! My friend, bassist Damian Erskine is a well known music educator and has had several books published under Amazon's Kindle platform. He posted the following last month on Facebook, and followed up with a comment saying he is getting ZERO response from the company regarding remedying the situation...
"Woke up to an email from kindle publishing (Amazon’s publishing service) stating that i somehow had multiple accounts, had violated the terms of service, and they removed all of my books from Amazon’s site. Not only that but I was banned from publishing on amazon through any new accounts!!! Yikes"
Federal regulators need to step in! Republican legislators say they are pro-business, yet refuse to take steps to protect small businesses from monopsony giants like Amazon!
10
It takes only the slightest care to ensure that the books you buy from Amazon are well put together.
1
I made my first purchase from Amazon in 2,000. It was a kiddie video that, despite having looked, I could not find anywhere else to give as a Christmas gift. I quickly came to realize that going to this one website on my computer was much better than running around to different stores and coming up empty. It was even a good price.
3
"This is not really negligence on Amazon’s part."
Yes, it is. And it's happening in a number of quarters.
This is the Silicon Valley idea that someone can just have an idea, put it online, and rake in billions without taking any responsibility for the end product or the necessary worker-drones.
It's there in the Uber model, Facebook, and Air B'n'B as well
The "brilliant" founders put their brand names on it, rake in the money, then disclaim all responsibility for the actual product.
No more.
17
Sounds like Amazon has decided it will enforce only the copyrights that enrich it, and leave legitimate authors who have been plagiarized to the Devil. This is not responsible business leadership, and needs to be punished. Whether that happens though Federal intervention or local action, in whatever form, is up to us. Well? What do YOU want to do about it?
5
I no longer buy stuff from Amazon. I always read reviews starting at the bottom one star. I saw too many reviews, most of them from Amazon, with comments like 'We ordered something new, but got something with signs of use'
5
This will read as just another tut-tutting, but there's no one more to blame than the hundreds of millions of people who've chosen to buy products from Amazon.
Buy books from your local, independent booksellers.
Don't have one (anymore)? Buy from the publisher. It's usually not hard.
Need an academic handbook? Buy from the publisher, university press, or sanctioning organization.
All of my scientific handbooks have been thusly sourced.
Same goes for other products.
America voted with its pocketbook: convenience won.
13
The problem isn't just books-- it is widespread across multiple categories.
3
@Matt
Right.
Ergo "Same goes for other products."
The Chicago School of Anti-Trust led by Nobelist George Stigler justified big business, because it created economies of scale. If you produced a million widgets a year, the cost of each widget would be much lower than if you produced a hundred. The start-op or fixed costs could be spread over the million rather than the hundred.
What the School knew about but didn't emphasize is that if a company became too big, it incurred dis-economies of scale, particular in regard to management. Mr. Bezos didn't answer the gentleman's complaint, because he sits at the top of an enormous managerial pyramid, with ten people reporting to him, 50 reporting to those ten, 100 hundred reporting to each of those 50, and so on.
So Raj, a member of a particular team, responded to Mr. Kelly. There are probably dozens of such teams at Amazon, each of which probably knows little about what the other teams are doing.
The answer to these diseconomies is simple but drastic. The Justice Department should sue to break up Amazon, Facebook, and other behemoths into more manageable units.
15
How is an online marketplace different form a brick/mortar store?
Online companies are impenetrable. No accountability, shielded by lawyers, not law.
That's what cowardice is. Blame the politicians. Reps and Dems.
7
We have no one to blame but ourselves as long as we keep ordering from Amazon.
14
I purchased what I thought were Oakley sunglasses on Amazon. Being somewhat of an Oakley fan I knew immediately they were fake when I received them from somewhere in China. The seller ignored me and Amazon was difficult to deal with and didn’t ever follow up with me about the seller, although they did issue me a refund, finally. One has to wonder how many naive people are wearing counterfeit goods from Amazon though... a real problem.
4
Very large companies can do very well under a visionary leader, e.g., Sandy Weill’s Citigroup or Hank Greenberg’s AIG, but when the leader moves on, they fail. What happens when Bezos buggers off to Mars, and we’re all left dependent upon a retailer that can’t retail?
1
Interesting that you would cite both Weill and Hank Greenberg as leaders. Weill built a behemoth of a bank of hat almost went under in the Great Recession and AIG almost brought down the world economy. Both ended up as shadows of themselves and AIG as a ward of the state. 👀
2
While the reviews can help a buyer detect fakes you still have to be vey careful. You should assume that any product may be counterfeit. Read all of the negative reviews and ignore the positive reviews which can also be fake. Even a single negative review that claims the buyer received a fake should be enough warning to stay away. Even if you bought the same item before you should not assume that buying it again is safe. I have stopped buying commodity items through Amazon unless there are over a 1000 reviews with no indication of a fake product. While it is not a substitute for strong regulation, if enough people do what I do Amazon will see it in their bottom line and will have to police suppliers.
3
Even the most of the reviews are generated by Amazon’s own reviewers! They’re given stuff for free for the sole purpose of writing reviews. Easy to detect, generally because the reviews are detailed, lengthy, etc: think about it, how often do you bother to write one and if you do, how much do you write?
As for the rest of what they’re selling aside from books, almost all of the search results bring about no-name items from China. No thanks.
And this news of the counterfeit books is a disgrace. Remember the days of the robber barons?? We are there again. It’s just a different kind of industrial revolution, things are new again and require a different kind of regulation. Not strangulating control but a code to adhere to all the same. Unbridled growth and development leading to world domination doesn’t benefit very many people now, does it?
Only selling counterfeit goods isn’t new ground is it? That’s just what happens every day on the street but usually goes unchecked because worse things are happening only wait...what? It’s on the internet so it must be ok.
Ha ha ha.
4
This is the same complaint people have about Alibaba.
The company has cracked down on counterfeits because it was impacting the company’s reputation and there were multiple lawsuits filed.
Maybe Amazon will realize they are more then a platform and are facilitating the spread of trademarked materials.
They are basically helping people break the law, but that doesn’t matter as long as Amazon gets its cut of the profits.
Good luck trying to sue amazon. See how much it will cost and how far you will get.
4
I love Amazon for its huge selection and good prices. I buy everything from dried chillies to expensive jeans and small appliances. I love Kindle. And I love Amazon Prime videos.
That said, I've contacted Amazon a number of times because a seller is falsely claiming that their product is a premium brand when it is no such thing -- it's a cheap knock-off. I have never had a response from Amazon, and the seller is still making false claims. Clearly, they don't care.
4
And yet you still love Amazon????
10
I used to be in the book business. I rarely buy anything from Amazon and never books. I go first to local bookstores (I'll place an order with them if needed), then next to a brick and mortar Barnes and Noble ( somewhat rarely to that company's web site). Generally, I find that I look beyond price to buying local, buying something made in the U.S., and buying from independents on-line. I'm willing to pay a little more to support alternative businesses. I know that, for working class families, price can be a deciding factor. To make ends meet, they must be careful shoppers. But for the moment I have some leeway to pay a little more to support alternatives. The working conditions in our local bookstores look better than I imagine them to be at some giant Amazon warehouse.
8
@T Norris - You make Bezos sound like he is a member of the Walton family concerning workers.
I live in Seattle and no one in this city feels sorry for an Amazon worker. They make top dollar and get to go to work to an indoor tropical forest that Jeff built. Google the Amazon biospheres and tell me if your boss built you a place like this to work in:)
Back in the late 80s, I think it was, repetitive stress injury (RSI) became common in Silicon Valley, where I worked. The most comon cause was computer keyboards. Their squared-off grids force users to hold their hands and wrists in stressful positions, causing long-term damage, even ending careers. Maxine Waters, then representing a Los Angleles district in the California legislature, decided to do something about it. She introduced a bill that would have made computer manufacturers like Apple and Microsoft liable for users' injuries.
Well, of course, she caught hell for presuming to challenge the mighty Silicon Valley, her bill died, and keyboards are still the dangerously stressful unhealthy objects they were then. That's when I realized Silicon Valley was dangerous.
PS
To Microsoft's credit, it sells safer keyboards while Apple refuses to.
3
Amazon also screws craftspeople-sellers on its platform. I knew a custom guitar maker who sold a guitar to someone. That person roughed it up and returned it. Amazon not only forced the seller to take it back but to pay fees for the transactional process. Their platform is useful but as a monopoly it’s predatory.
6
Notice the pattern. Amazon declines to police quality or authenticity, the site is full of fakes and hucksters, and despite having enormous resources Amazon has no incentive to fix it because they make money off lies and fakes as well as the real thing.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. work the same way. They have fig-leaf terms of service but, for the most part, decline to police truth, hate, etc. and now they are filled with QAnon, Nazis, anti-vaxxers, Islamic and Islamophobic extremists, and trolls. The fake news they let in helped enable the ultimate huckster, Donald Trump, to become President, and the truth- twisting propaganda they allow helps him stay in power. Social media companies of course know this but, like Amazon, have no incentive to fix it because it's not a problem for their business model.
Unaccountable social media companies have helped enrich and elevate the worst of us. The harm--to minorities, public health, and the climate, to name a few--is obvious and huge. It's past time to regulate the tech giants. The question is how, not whether.
10
@Jeremy. So Obama's two successful elections had nothing to do with extensive use of social media, eh? Sounds like your issue is with the tech giants, not the ideologies of this or that political party -- and there I'd agree with you. There's no need to stretch any and every topic to include your rancor for a particular side. It actually weakens those of your points that are legitimate.
@Judy Harmon Smith It's not about ideology. It's about lies and distortions that lead to harmful outcomes.
The problem is correctly identified, but the identification of the cause is way off the mark. The causes of this problem are the existence of the internet and the ease of scanning and altering books. To see this, imagine that Amazon were broken into 100 firms, each with 1% of Amazon's current market share. Whatever the difficulty publishers have dealing with Amazon, the difficulty would be multiplied by at least 100 times, if not more. It would be as difficult to control counterfeit books as it is to control the fake Nigerian bankers who e-mail people offering a share of a large bank account in return for assistance.
What to do about this problem? I have as much sympathy for a defrauded purchaser of scientific books as I do for somebody who buys a $10 Rolex on a New York street. You should be smart enough to figure out that if you're buying the book for an unrealistically low price, maybe there's something wrong with it. Try ordering directly from the publisher.
Publishers have a much bigger problem. You could try selling the book yourself, or through only a few trusted wholesalers. This would be expensive and would likely cost you sales, but if you really have a uniquely valuable resource it would probably work. You would give up the huge advantages that the internet and the computer have brought to all retailing, but you would be no worse off than your pre-WWII predecessors were.
@Frank Lerman
Frank, if we had 100 online sellers, then publishers could choose to punish the ones who don't police their inventory correctly. So with sufficient competition, publishers can have the choice to declare that "all our books bought at E-Shop X are counterfeit, because we don't sell to them". This would force E-Shop X to better police their inventory, or risk losing business.
In other words, competition could allow customers or publishers to register protest votes and force sellers to fix the problem. It's very simple. Competition might make problems harder to handle, but it gives you much more incentive to solve them.
4
@Frieda Vizel
A publisher can do that now by refusing to sell books through Amazon, and sell only through bookstores or directly from the publisher, or perhaps from specific scientific and technical web sites. It won't work for mass market publishers, but it will for scientific and technical publications. After all, that's how all books were sold pre-internet.
1
And people are also selling publications produced by the U.S. government, that are otherwise available at no charge and/or online. I suppose some could argue they are charging for added value, if they print and bind a publication. I saw one of our recent publications advertised for $40, and signed by the author! (no, it was not signed, trust me). So if you need an Ag Handbook or GTR or some other publication produced a federal agency, contact them or search online.
3
Boo hoo. When I’ve bought technical engineering books in the “good old days” I paid hundreds per book as a chemical engineer as an undergrad and graduate school.
Now that I can get outrageously expensive books for much less, I don’t feel sorry for the publisher villains.
Patrick
1
It you ever put your own intellectual property on the market, I bet you'll feel differently--or maybe you don't think authors need to make a living.
3
This reminds me of the robocalls I get, maybe 500/month. I think it is it's own little, or not so little, industry. Verizon, AT&T and the rest all say they are aware of the problem and are working on it, but it seems as if they are probably making money off them, maybe 1/1000 or 1/100th of a penny got each call, whatever they might make, they really have no incentive to stop it.
5
This otherwise interesting article conflates Amazon's business model's shortcomings with whether the company is a monopoly. The article makes the case for the former loud and clear, but for the latter, not at all. Breaking up Amazon will not solve this problem.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon occupy the new gilded age robber baron malefactors of great wealth without manufacturing any product by exploiting service convenience and personal information.
Bust it up! Fine them up! Lock them up!
13
Amazon is on the same path that led eBay to ruination. I used to shop frequently on eBay but haven’t used it in years. The scammers and proliferation of counterfeit goods and misrepresented products made eBay so untrustworthy it became unusable. Sure, most of the time you got what you ordered – but who wants to shop at a place where you always have to worry about getting what you paid for? My own reliability issues with Amazon sellers have included products that were sold as new, first quality items but which were clearly factory seconds
Amazon is swamped with garbage products. Making matters worse is their search function is horrible. It’s impossible to filter out all the junk. Even when you manage to winnow it down, searches return pages cluttered with sponsored ads and unrelated products. Most searches return sellers with inscrutable names and product listings in broken English. If Amazon doesn’t want to actively police sellers for trustworthiness and products for quality, fine. People who don’t want the online flea market experience will shop elsewhere.
5
Hmm. I use eBay regularly but I avoid anything that originates in China.
2
But, on the other hand, free two-day shipping.
3
And then there are the reviews. I recently was looking for a children's book for my grandson. I narrowed it down to an author and all of her books had four or five star reviews. Not one of the reviewers was a verified purchaser and all of them raved, raved, raved about these books. One book, whose age group was 8 years old, actually had a review published by a self-proclaimed eight year old who spoke about how awesome this book was and that fact that it empowered him to not be afraid to face becoming nine; he knew the future was bright because this book gave him the confidence to see that. Seriously - what garbage. Anyone who believes the Amazon reviews should have their head examined.
5
If you go into a restaurant and order a steak and they serve you mince meat you send it back, or walk out and never go back.
5
So many fakes on Amazon, across all categories including children's toys, books, even toilet paper. Convenient though it was, dealing with more than a dozen fakes from amazon in a year compelled me to go shop in stores in my community. So, something good came out of it, I guess.
6
I had no idea about all this, and now that I do I will not buy another book on Amazon. Ever. Period. If I can't afford a new book's price, then I'll exercise some patience and wait for the paperback at the one remaining bookseller in driving distance, or wait a little longer and support my local used book store. There's no excuse for participating with criminality.
9
It’s a sad commentary on the reach of Amazing that you live in LA and only have one bookseller in driving distance. Here in the piedmont of North Carolina (part of the Heart of Darkness many of my fellow NYT readers love to malign) I live within driving distance of one independent bookstore that sells new books, one B&N, and a couple of really good used book stores as well as killer selections at the local Goodwills. Also a ton of Free Little Libraries. No Amazon for me!
4
Please, give me a break.
If I saw my doctor pulling up a paperback book for a dosage on medication, vs pulling it up on her iPad (electronically) as she does, I'd find another doctor.
Paper books are an archaic invention that is terrible for the environment, waste space, and, for important information (like up to date best practices in medicine) hopefully out of date.
And if anything a large platform like Amazon is much better equipped to deal with counterfeiting than smaller bookstores.
Another non issue created by last-century thinking.
3
As an MD who regularly uses both pocket book and electronic reference sources, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
8
This is the perfect example of putting profit and money (only a symbol for what we value, that can’t be eaten or read, so it becomes a symbol of itself in a monopoly or oligarchical context) over people (who collectively = culture, which is where food and all we find nourishing and meaningful is expressed). Boards of Directors and these new Kings of tech empire won’t realize the value of anything until they realize they can’t eat or read money.
1
As a retailer isn't Amazon subject to product liability laws, If not, why not.
5
Where are the regulators? For years I have been asking why so many laws to restrict guns, drug, abortion, but so few to keep big tech companies in check. One may argue "Guns kill people." Yet, big tech companies are destroying American society in so many invisible ways. Perhaps those in Washington are so busy "investigating" one another...
7
This fiasco is similar to Kinko’s in the 1990s when they flagrantly disregarded copyright for colleges and put together massive binders of xeroxed articles and books. Eventually lawsuits were filed and regulations put in place. Seems like the time is ripe for Amazon to have their own moment of for whom the bell tolls....
8
I used to see books I've written that have a suggested retail price of $28 or so advertised by Amazon sellers for hundreds of dollars more. I assumed these sellers were hoping someone drunk or addled would click the wrong box & order them at the crazy price even though there were legitimate sellers offering the same book at legitimate prices in the same column. When I complained to Amazon, the folks there sounded surprised, but it's a common practice. I don't check out the sellers anymore because I can't stand to see my hard work become part of someone's vile scam.
8
I bought what was supposed to be GE flood lamps and received cheap made in China counterfeits several times. I have become more wary about buying from Amazon now.
2
Music composers and singer-songwriters have been ripped off for decades now: DJ's, online "sharing", streaming services - you name it.
The tech corporations don't care. they make profit everytime you buy something. The creator or the publisher or the small business trying to stay alive by selling on Amazon doesn't.
Amazon, uber, spotify, pandora, -- all these tech companies do is insert themselves into commercial transactions to reap fees from every side and push the content creators deeper and deeper into penury.
6
We are a high volume retailer with a trademarked product who also sells on Amazon. When another seller on Amazon offered products of substantially lesser quality on Amazon while also using our trademark we filed a complaint with Amazon's IP department, providing proof of ownership of our trademarks as directed. What happened next could have only appeared in a Franz Kafka novel- WE were charged with infringing on our own mark and as is Amazon's way, our performance rankings were demoted as a result. We were NEVER able to resolve the matter.
Once again, someone is infringing on our registered trademark product. But this time we're not going to take a chance. We'll let the customers figure out on their own that they didn't receive what they were ordering.
31
@Larry I'm very sorry to hear this happened to you. Sadly, I've seen it happen WAY too many times on the Amazon seller forums.
If the price of books hadn't been so incredibly expensive, Amazon would have never gotten a foothold. I couldn't afford to buy new books before Amazon came along and slashed prices. This is a common story nowadays.
3
“This is not really negligence on Amazon’s part. It is the company’s business model.”
Why is Amazon not legally liable for fraud, counterfeit claims and substantial damages when criminal activity saturates its operations?
If we had a working Congress - or should I stipulate a working Republican Congress - perhaps Amazon would be held responsible.
9
I am not aware of any case where Amazon, itself, has sold fake anything. The problem lies in it being a platform for many other much smaller retail operations who use Amazon as a distribution platform. These businesses are completely independent of Amazon but use its services much as any business would use phone, internet and delivery services provided by others. For a business it’s a great service and Amazon has helped many a small mom and pop operation to flourish. The problem arises when bad actors use the platform. Not only do we see a proliferation of fake items, but there are also companies who charge outlandishly exorbitant amounts for a product or engage in other strange practices that have been written about extensively.
Amazon has a policing strategy for these rogue companies that relies on complaints. Unfortunately it is much too easy to game and is all too often fraudulently used to put competitors out of business. Ebay and Etsy seem to do a much better job of monitoring sellers. They also do not confuse matters by selling merchandise themselves.
Amazon is in the hot seat right now and needs to wake up and get control of this situation fast. They need to make it much clearer to the consumer whether they are buying from Amazon directly or from a third party seller in the Amazon Marketplace. And within the Amazon Marketplace they need a much more effective way of shutting down fraudulent businesses while allowing honest ones to thrive.
7
Read the reviews of nearly any product on Amazon, not just books, and you will see many one-star reviews from people who received a fake version of the item. I'm not a lawyer but it seems clear Amazon should be legally liable for this. It's their platform, they take the orders, they ship the products -- how can they dodge responsibility?
12
@Bruce Crabtree
They should be responsible -especially if people send written complaints about a particular seller peddling fakes. I've reported this numerous times and never had a response from Amazon.
2
Finally, this article has arrived, but it vastly understates the problem of counterfeits and fraudulent advertising on Amazon, and the degree of Amazon's responsibility in it.
First, the reviews Amazon publishes are not for a specific edition of the work, but all editions of that work, in whatever language, including counterfeits. (I have stopped writing reviews for Amazon books, as they will likely be published under the wrong book.)
I have received many counterfeit books from Amazon, particularly foreign language classics. The author of one such offprint of "Les Miserables" in French, a thin volume with no copyright info, has 97 other books, mostly in Spanish, on Amazon, that are similar offprints. I have complained to Amazon many times. They refund my money, and tell me they are looking into the fraud, butI can't be involved. No matter how many followup calls, the books remain on Amazon, with the reviews of genuine editions on their page. My review, saying it is a fake, appears with others like it at the bottom.
This does not just happen with books, although there is more room for the review stunt with books. I wanted to buy a leather chair. All the "genuine leather" chairs on Amazon turned out to be some version of fake leather or adulterated leather. Chairs in general often don't mention that they are shipped in pieces.
I have looked for high quality steel pans. They are often mislabeled as a higher quality product, and include reviews of that product.
Caveat emptor!
19
@dr. c.c. Just curious, after all these bad experiences, do you still shop on Amazon? You didn't say you have stopped.
I recently contacted Amazon over a book I published in 1998 which had many reviews and a rating of 4 stars. It now has all those reviews removed and only a 1 star review remains. When I questioned this I was told my question was not valid.
We have sold publishing to the devil.
Heartbreaking to think of how the world is changing, but most importantly how artists are losing all rights to royalties, acknowledgement and livelihood.
Beth
9
4 years and counting since I’ve bought anything from Amazon!
5
This is in no way limited to books, nor does it have anything to do with an alleged selling monopoly by Amazon.
There are nefarious 3rd party merchants that will set up shop on Amazon to peddle products that are not what they are advertising on their listing. It IS a violation of Amazon policy for merchants to do so and when reported and confirmed, Amazon will ban the product and often the entire merchant storefront listings. There is no way for a company even as big an technically savvy as Amazon to pre-police products listed, sold, shipped by a 3rd party. So.. they do police-by-reporting and remedy.. which by the way other online merchants do as well (Walmart, Bestbuy, others also do a hefty 3rd party listing service for independent merchants now days)
This does not mean all 3rd party merchants who sell and ship sales listed on Amazon are nefarious... only that this is the channel loophole that nefarious merchants will try to exploit.
As a long time Amazon customer... my rule is to never buy anything on Amazon unless it is either sold/shipped by Amazon LLC... or is sold by a 3rd party merchant but fulfilled by Amazon LLC. This precaution alone mitigates about 99% of possible fraud and counterfeits.. and even if one slips through.. Amazon will make good on the product (either via refund, or by replacement with a genuine product).
This is much ado about nothing ... other then the reality that many online merchant sites can and do offer a 3rd party merchant service.
1
British booksellers & publishers that do not have the US rights to sell their books here, get around this by sending them to Amazon to sell for them. British book prices are significantly lower than the cost of books in the US. They are making a killing.
2
Amazon “said it strictly prohibited counterfeit products.” Hahahahaha! I ordered an item from them, received an obvious fake, and posted a review to that effect. Amazon deleted my review and continued to list the product/seller. We all know how much Amazon cares about potentially dangerous counterfeits. What did we think we would get when we decided to a) stop enforcing antitrust law; and b) allow tech platforms to disclaim liability for the harms their platforms cause?
11
Amazon shouldn’t be broken up as a monopoly for engaging in these shady business practices, they should be shut down under anti-corruption and racketeering laws.
12
Biggest company in the world. Never happen. Not ever.
It's not too late to shop at Mom and Pop stores, and the few extra pennies support what social fabric we have left. If you read about Amazon's punishing "Camperforce" - how the company employs (for low wages) older people living out of their vans and provides free pain pills from dispensers on the walls, you should think twice about giving this company one more dime. We decry the harsh conditions for those held at our borders. What about those within our borders forced to work for an inhumane company such as this (due to lack of work available at all)?
4
If you're just an individual or family consumer, what you get from Big Tech is a Big Yawn on quality and service. Sooo easy to off-load traditional quality control in design and manufacturing, and simply backstop the resulting shoddy product with a money-back guarantee. Foreign makers, who often proudly call themselves startups (as if this should excuse poor work), cut every corner they can to achieve a low selling price. Better brands either cede the market to them and cease production of such items, or make similar quality reductions to compete. Our landfills overflow with the resulting junk; the resources consumed to produce, ship and market such stuff are a total waste, having served no purpose other than putting phantom merchandise in a box and people's hard-earned dollars in some crooked business's pocket. For shame!
3
Just like every other tech greed-bomb, Amazon wants to cover the sky with potentially fatal drones, disturb air traffic and the environment, put thousands out of work and vastly underpay and abuse those the employ themselves, claim massive tax breaks, secure little spy stations in every room of every house, redefine life as we know it, but, golly, they can't find a way to make sure they're not robbing their customers blind.
In fact, they resent the implication they should have to.
Don't you get it? Everything is so Amazoningly Wonderful, why are you gonna let a few books ruin everything?
Besides, they're books, and Amazon is a tech company, so...
5
Yes. Counterfeit book selling is a rampant problem on Amazon! I can't even believe they are denying how bad it is! Talk to any publisher and they'll tell you that the growth of counterfeit book sellers on Amazon is a cancer. Amazon shuts one down and they just pop up under another name the next day. I wish I could stop shopping on Amazon. Is there a 12-step program for Amazon addiction?
3
Everything is about convenience. Amazon happily put bookstores out of business by there business model of pricing low and deliveries the next day. They paid there warehouse employees very low wages.
Technology is a platform for fraud, and the CEO's act as if it is not happening. They knew this would be a side effect and did nothing, in the same manner that the mission of Facebook mumble jumble that good communities would thrive on Facebook such a shock that these good communities were full of evil people.
Greed drives Amazon quality doesnt. Its all about being the big dog and all the quality in books,products go to the sidelines. Quality is irrelevant for Amazon they just don't care about changing there behavior.
We have choices, just dont patronize them call your medical bookstore, go to Barnes & Nobles. Take control and stop throwing your money away that is the only way things will change. Its about the dollar hit them in the bottom line boycott they will change.
5
I've read the requirements for artists who upload their works, and it appears that copyrights are needed before you can upload.
There are problems with counterfeit products everywhere; from my perspective, it appears the company is taking steps to ensure that this is kept at a minimum -- but it's not easy tracking down all fraudulent activity.
Perfect case in point: We have a fraud in the oval office, and I didn't find the NY Times in 2016 doing much to ensure that his fraudulent activity is exposed. Wasn't that the job that had to be done in terms of exposition in journalism? Did anyone bother to, for example, interview any of the litigants in 3 class action lawsuits that were filed against Trump University - all claiming fraud and racketeering? What about interviews with former employees who were also found to be litigants against Trump "U"? Was the Playbook published?
Why wasn't that front page news. If you want to talk about ensuring people against Fraud, how hard would it have been to expose this president before the GOP endorsed him.
5
Predatory Capitalism doesn’t make for a healthy country or world.
Just because it’s “legal” doesn’t make it good or right.
Greed rules America at this point in history, and the fabric of our civilization is being shredded.
3
The board game industry is suffering the same issues with counterfits ALL over Amazon. Luckily a lot of the publishers will replace defective parts with real ones if you reach out to them, but i would never buy a board game on Amazon ever again.
2
I don't think this is the result of monopoly. Suppose there was another internet book seller. What would prevent the counterfeiters from listing their fakes there? It would probably enhance their undeserved credibility.
I think the problem is e-commerce in general. If you go to a real store you can examine the goods before you buy.
A cure might be for Amazon to guarantee free returns and accept responsibility for refunds. Amazon would not likely volunteer to do this, so regulations might be needed. If Amazon had to pay for counterfeits it would act as a spur to action on their part.
1
The flood gates are open. This article questions the authenticity of every product sold through Amazon. It is clear that Amazon could care less. The question is do Amazon customers care?
Like the principle of privacy (Facebook, etc) the concept of monopolies seems old fashioned with a large swath of society focused on "I want what I want when I want it," who cares about the authenticity of the product or the extent that the monopolistic practices of Amazon has undermined the retail market.
Yet another example of Let's Make America Great Again.
1
As Amazon has grown, I've become more likely, rather than less likely, to buy books directly from the publisher, or, in the case of used books, to buy from a reliable site that also lets me choose the closest seller so it minimizes energy consumed.
The biggest technology firms have done some good, but also in cases like this, or other "we're a platform" types, they've conveniently found ways to keep taking a cut while claiming it's simply impossible to police those paying the cut.
3
If it follows this cynical, who-cares business model of Amazon, maybe the Bezos-owned Washington Post is fake news after all.
If this is about books, what about things that go into our bodies
??? Really Scary!!
4
Ebay beat Amazon to the punch in being the world's largest purveyor of counterfeit good and stolen goods. When Ebay and PayPal were the same company I had someone use a stolen credit card to make a large purchase on my site and then re-sell the item on Ebay. They posted the pictures with MY CARTON in them. I sent the info to Ebay and to PayPal, demanding that PayPal reimburse me after the bank refused. (The thieves had all the card holder's information) PayPal refused to give me the money that the thief made off of the sale. Now that's a racket the Times should be writing about.
Pick your large company and complain!
Don't like Walmart? Don't like Alibaba? Don't like Google? Don't like YouTube? Don't like the Republicans?
Just wait until the NYT publishes a story (that finds faults and never solutions) and then complain to your hearts content!
If I can support a local business, I will, even if it means paying a bit more (a bit more - I'm not stupid with money!)
But I am not going to place much faith in someone who writes about how Amazons CO2 footprint is so large - Not when the product has to be shipped and picked up regardless of where it was purchased - it still had to be shipped to the place of your choice before you fired up your vehicle, drove down to the store, circled the block a few time looking for a parking place and then drove home!
Yes, counterfeits are found on Amazon. They are also found at Flea Markets, Mom & Pop stores and your local grocery store... you really think that is quality virgin olive oil being offered at such a low price? You really think that is Swordfish? You really think that is Red Snapper? How about that Rolex you purchased at the mall? What about that pair of jeans your wearing or the Hand Bag you carry? That bottle of wine?
Heck, I recall a major baby food company selling fake apple juice to hundreds of thousand of mothers here in the states!
The worst part is the fact that there are plenty of Martyrs who will write in... I will never ever shop there again... until they have a really good sale!
2
@The Critic I agree about the food products being sold throughout the U.S. I hadn't tasted real olive oil till I jointed an olive oil club and realized how much flavor I was missing. Now, it is difficult for me to buy anything but real olive oil. The older I get, the less I want... but the better quality. Life is too short to fill your house with stuff that will end up in your closet or garage. I prefer to garden and literally enjoy the fruits of my work.
While researching online for a flute for my daughter, I noticed that flute manufacturers won't warranty the flute if bought from Amazon. Now, I know why. I am going to a local business to buy one. It's better anyway because the staff are educated about instruments and can help you with questions. Less cost and hassle in the long run.
1
Shut it down. It’s Napster for everything. It serves no useful purpose. Shut it down.
1
Napster served a noble purpose, AND didn't take away your mp3 after you downloaded it. Amazon takes away ebooks people PAID FOR.
No, Amazon's not Napster; they're (acting, without irony given the counterfeits and cheap Chinese stuff, like) the RIAA.
Amazon is devil's spawn. If you buy from Amazon just to save a bit of money, you are contributing to the demise of American culture. Open your eyes.
3
What happens??? Slice up the pig and make 10x the jobs!
I dread to sound holier than though but, I thought about this some years ago - having been an Amazon user myself - mainly for books. I did not want Amazon to take over the world. Especially not the world of books, which I am passionate about. As an alternative, I use a fairly local bookseller who deals mainly in second hand copies. That pleases me no end. As an ecologist, I get the satisfaction of reusing a book that has not travelled hundreds or thousands of miles. The books are always in the condition stated on their website or, no quibble money back (which I have never had to make use of, unlike Amazon). The books are low in price, depending of course on what you want because admittedly, there are a selection of rare books I salivate over, regularly. Many of them currently reside on the fantasy book shelves of my Dream Bookcase. Is it alright to say that it is World of Books? Happy hunting.
2
This is Amazons moment in history which is very similer to Standard Oil a hundred plus years ago. For the good of the country the whole thing has to be forcebly broken up for the sake of society and the economy. Internet shopping will never go away, but to have is consoldated into one company helps only a few people at the very top of Amazon. Okay, one person. But, Rockerfeller Sr. was in the same position with the same monopoly and the world did not come to an end for that family, or for the oil and gas industry. In a captilistic modern world people will fairly regualry come up with brilliant marketing ideas. It’s up to the government to not allow them to be exploitive and detrimental to society. The problem is that our government is rigged by corporatism and the courts to not intervene anymore.
5
In the real world( not the cyber one) sellers are responsible for the authenticity of the products they market. If a buy a rotten tomato from Publix, for example, or a fake diamond from a reputable jeweler, they will refund the purchase price. Why shouldn’t Amazon be held to the same standards? If it cost them more to guarantee their products, like a normal merchant, then so be it. As it turns out, I am less inclined each day to buy from Amazon.
9
I cancelled prime awhile back and noticed Amazon deliberately delays shipment to non prime customers, so I started shopping around. Walmart, Target, Costco have had plenty of time to catch up with Amazon and all have free 2 day shipping without a membership and offer competitively priced non-counterfeit items - most of which arrive sooner than prime ever did. There are options out there for consumers who have had enough of Amazon's monopoly.
11
Seems to me Amazon should guarantee buyers a genuine copy and back that up by replacing counterfeits with the genuine article.
2
Amazon is not even a close call: it is a monopoly. We need a government that actively breaks up “these capitalist bloated things”.
We used to know this: I guess we need to re-learn.
2
I've been shopping on Amazon since the beginning and I don;t think I;ve got any counterfeits, fake books or ebooks. In general, a discerning reader can learn quite a bit from the reviews. If you buy a cheap product with one-star reviews you should know what to expect.
1
Seems to me the culprit is technology. The ease and economics of print on demand. If a thing can be stolen, it will be. To think otherwise would be to believe politicians can stop the theft of inellectual property.
Are we really still crying about the poor individual author-capitalist who feels that property has been stolen? The private ownership of ideas is coming to an end -- as it should. Much is available free on the internet, except of course, where publishing is tied to college course requirements that result in the cozy $200 textbook or where science publishing is behind pay walls geared to the preservation of the publishing industry.
And are writers-artists really in it for social recognition and money? Sure, make a living, but if everyone had an equal and guaranteed income, would there still be writers and artists? Yes and more. The era of genius, where an individual brain was the fountain of wisdom, is over. It was the product of a constricted and competitive system for controlling scarce resources. The common person can sigh in relief and embrace a culture no longer locked behind the rich man's door.
And Amazon: it is the most efficient and effective organization around. I can't wait until it is nationalized and becomes a utility for resource distribution. Utility is not art. Express and be free.
You might feel differently if it was your book.
2
All other large corporations are expected to perform quality control on their products, and to stand behind what they sell. If Ford were to receive a batch of counterfeit car parts, they would first of all probably detect it, and if the parts ended up in cars they would issue a recall. Why should Amazon be held to a lower standard? Worse yet, their lax approach saves them money, which allows them to undercut their legitimate competitors.
Unleash Sen. Warren!
3
From my own experiences as an author, and a consumer, I’ve found that a) for the multiple tech books I sell through Amazon, and also directly to educational adopters via my publisher, I haven’t seen many fraudulent copies being sold (at least from what I can see or understand as such), through 3rd party vendors. If someone in the US gets an international version of one of my books at 1/4 the price, that’s their business, I don’t really care. Not only can you read the customer reviews, but you can also read the seller reviews. You don’t have to believe either of those. b) Out of the hundreds of purchases I’ve made over the last dozen years, only one or two were questionable, and that was for electronics. Amazon does offer a guaranteed return window that’s pretty generous, so if you feel as if you’ve been ripped off, you can send the purchase back and get a total refund. I’ve done that with the one or two questionable purchases, and it worked.
I do shop locally if I can get a better price on exactly what I want.
2
My book is incorrectly listed on Amazon and despite multiple inquiries by myself and my publisher since late 2018, Amazon has failed to correct the listing. No response from the money hungry behemoth. Although I like the convenience of my years old Kindle for some reading, I no longer order anything from Amazon.
3
Amazon and their subsidiaries have taken over everything!
Don’t want to get them angry. No telling what they’re capable of.
Uh oh. What just happened? A Twitch?....
Zappos!
I think the entire grid just went down!
No Amazon TV. No Amazon Video.
Good thing I’m prepared.
Already shopped at Whole Foods Market.
Stocked up on reading material at Goodreads.
Did I forget anything?
OMG! I’m gonna need a Kindle for when it gets dark
Alexa, where is the nearest Kindle Store?
Alexa? Alexa! Are you there?
All I hear is a faint Echo....
1
I have been an Amazon customer "since the beginning" and a Prime member for well over a decade.
"In the beginning", and on their ride to the top, I only have nice things to say.
But once a company reaches the top big problems creep in.
I can use the Home Depot as an example.
Their meteoric rise was just like Amazon's - just earlier.
When the chain broke out, they carried high quality merchandise and their aisles were staffed with veteran trades-people.
As the local and trusted mom & pop hardware stores were squeezed out, things changed at Home Depot; The quality of goods began to drop and the tradespeople in the aisles began to disappear.
The "how-to" advice which was readily available from our local hardware stores and the aisles of Hope Depot also disappeared.
They've cornered the market and "you get what you get" !
Enter Amazon, an on-line book retailer.
They did a great job at getting us books, and eventually "everything" at a fair price and in record time.
What Happened ?
They got so big that they could no longer keep their eye on who was selling what.
Yes, in addition to the variety of goods under their own name, they became one of the largest "Flea Markets" on the Web !
Yes Flea Market !
What else can we call an entity that allows all comers to set up shop and sell goods and services which Amazon does not directly check and monitor to customers who loyal Amzonians.
Amazon now faces the same fate as Facebook & YouTube;
They must be held accountable !
5
The counterfeiting of intellectual property, such as the book investigation here, is the tip of the iceberg. Though not risking lives, consumer's money and trust in quality brands is being completely undermined, particularly in clothing, handbags, and personal products, such as makeup. I have received counterfeit clothing and makeup, and I have investigated other products that I wished to buy. Even shoes from "Nike" or
"Adidas" can be easily found online, and these frequently use pictures of the real shoe in the online product description but then send you an ill-produced fake. Women's bras, pants, tops, and handbags all can be easily investigated and found to be fly-by-night overseas fakes. The damage done by Amazon's ruthless disregard for anything but profit is killing Americans' ability to trust this Empire of Cheap Fakes. Ebay, also owned by Bezos, is rampant with the same fake racketeering schemes. Art and every used collectible possible are faked or misrepresented, and the sellers, here a mixture of American individuals with small stores and online Asian storefronts, use disclaimers about "not being experts" or "buyer solely responsible for examining product". In other words, it's "caveat emptor" all over again, which is absolutely a truth for the ages, but it's the scale of the theft and corruption, and the proliferation of them throughout the online platform world that is shocking.
1
Amazon is guilty of countless monopolistic sins. Besides the scourge of counterfeiting, they have also joined supermarkets and big drugstore chains in the "store brand" game. It is now impossible to search Amazon for many products without entering a rabbit hole of sly Amazonian self-promotion. Originally store brands were low cost alternatives to well-advertised and more expensive national brands. For a long time now store brands have been a colossal bait and switch scam. Shoddy products (high margin ones as determined by algorithmic business models) are decorated with pseudo-branding. Often the anonymity of the actual manufacturers means there's little accountability for quality. And slowly but surely the store brands crowd everything else from the shelves. Playing this game, Amazon has the power to become America's company store with the degradation and humiliated powerlessness that involves for us mere individuals--NOT "consumers," if you don't mind.
5
The solution is simple; mandate that Amazon is responsible for what it sells. If it sells a knockoff, it must provide a refund. If it provides a fraudulent copy of a book, it owes a royalty to the original author(s) regardless of whomever else might have already been paid. And if someone is injured or dies due to details published in counterfeit medical texts, then Amazon should be held accountable for their negligence.
This is not forcing amazon to ensure that what is published is factual, but rather that the identity of all parties involved be properly vetted. In cases where they have done so, then the responsibilities arising from a defrauding would fall to that party. But when show that Amazon did not take reasonable precautions to determine if a text or product is legitimate, then Amazon should be compelled to accept responsibility.
Until the costs of fraud cannot be ignored, Amazon will continue to push the fallout of such fraud to everyone but themselves.
6
Amazon is okay overall, but for books, it's no substitute for a physical bookstore, especially one like Barnes & Noble, which acts like a cultural and meeting center -- a place where you can read, buy books, have coffee, meet people, and even hold a private conference.
1
Certainly if you feel that way then go to B&N. But remember, B&N drove a lot of smaller bookstores out of business.
@George Marshall
True, but they did so because they provided more than only books, as I mentioned. Also, I'd say they were more generous, letting you browse and read for hours, if you wanted. And still do.
I remember many bookstores (not all) in the pre-B&N era would scold you if you cracked open a book for too long.
If that’s your boat. That’s fine. Not everybody wants a book store to be social.
Last time I checked, reading was pretty much a solo activity unless you were reading for children.
I'm an author of seven traditionally published books on Amazon, and I very much appreciate the international marketing platform for books with international topics.
But in every other respect Amazon has turned books, genuine or counterfeit, the ink and paper they're printed with, the words and pictures within them to sludge. It is in the business of selling varying portions of book sludge.
The canary in the coal mine in the 1990s was the Amazon book review. Don't let them tell you that they've solved the review problem; instead they've taken it to a new level with the allowance of paid editorial reviews, and a whole book review industrial complex has grown up around them. I am regularly invited to pay up to 900.00 for a review of my books that can be placed on Amazon as I wish, edited to just the favorable parts, and the consumer still is given no indication that it is fake.
Amazon. Sludge.
5
The best thing to do is go to the publisher and order books from them directly. It is especially important to do so if it is a non-fiction or scientific text. Buying from the publisher avoids counterfeits and poor quality self-published works on Amazon
4
Once upon a time, our government broke up monopolies. Amazon needs to be broken up, and leashed. I try to boycott Amazon, but sometimes I can't buy something anywhere else.
6
Living on an Island, we were early adopters of Amazon saving us lengthy and expensive trips to Seattle by car and ferry boat. Sadly, the quality, integrity and service originally offered with Amazon has disappeared. Counterfeits of all kinds, not just books are now sold on Amazon, products which appear to be made and sold in the US are now from China and I suspect that our credit card information has been compromised through Amazon. Sorry Mr. Bezzos, we thought we knew you......
5
These monopolistic times, with companies like Amazon dominating the marketplace, while billionaires buy our government, call for two remedies - Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt. We have them, in the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren. A Sanders/Warren ticket would be a good start to rectifying the lopsided and punishing ways of our capitalism run amok.
7
Maybe. But I would make it Warren/Sanders instead of Sanders/Warren.
1
I just finished reading a Kindle ebook that was filled with grammar and spelling errors. I don't remember reading any book, novel, short story or poetry that was filled with so many errors. I would like to emphasize that eBooks are much easier to copy. Anyone can write a book and upload in a few seconds. Proofreaders - None. Where to complain - ? Do they care? The authors ask for 5 star reviews to continue on a tight budget.
The concept of inexpensive books through the business model of bulk sales sounds great. However, with no policing and no accountability, the concept no longer holds.
3
I hope Amazon will read this article and these comments and consider looking for additional ways to improve on the various issues that have been pointed out here.
Personally, I have shopped at Amazon some 20 years now, and have rarely had any issues with them. None of the many books or other items I have ordered have ever been counterfeits, at least as far as I can tell. I will be careful, but for now I will say that I am still feeling ok about buying from Amazon.
Just try communicating with Amazon as a customer--good luck! It is next to impossible to actually talk to a human (or a voice that perhaps is programmed to sound human). Amazon is now a walled little village full of pirates. From its famed "customer-centric" obsession, it is now a "catch me if you can" company.
Whatever charm Amazon had as a feisty little upstart has now been wiped out by the site's relentless assault on its customers. Buy a Kindle with "special offers" (aka ads) and it will drive you batty; pay Amazon to turn off the ads and you will still get sly little slip-in "notifications" that, golly, look a lot like "special offers."
Memo to Jeff Bezos: you have now wrung the ultimate golden eggs out of the goose. Leave that last couple of pennies on the table, mate. Stop planning to colonize the universe and pay attention to what's happening in Seattle.
4
@richard cheverton - This is so inaccurate, based on my experience, and many others I discuss with, it begs a response. Anytime I've ever had an issue with an order, I can get a chat agent online within 5min, and it is always resolved to my satisfaction. This is one of the best perks of buying from Amazon, peace of mind that I will get my money back if they order goes wrong.
3
If people can no longer trust that goods sold on Amazon are legitimate, it will come to be seen as just another EBay. Up until now, Amazon has avoided trying to verify the legitimacy of the goods it sells, because it adds to costs. But as Amazon becomes aware that people are losing faith in the legitimacy of goods sold on Amazon, I suspect they will realize that it is cost that they will need to incur in order to survive in their current form. Until then, buying anything from Amazon is caveat emptor.
1
I will not patronize Amazon. Ever. But my behavior is totally irrelevant; the fact is that Americans several years ago decided that convenience - and maybe saving $2 - was the paramount consideration in any transaction of any kind. It should not surprise anyone that the behemoth is now fully in charge. And by the time Americans decide to do anything about it, Jeff Bezos may well be - through his fascination with space travel - settled on Mars and completely immune from any kind of public or governmental response.
3
This is why anyone buying any pharmaceutical or medical product should only buy directly from the manufacturer's website. If the price is noticeably less on Amazon, that's probably because the Amazon product isn't legitimate. It shouldn't be necessary, but it is.
3
Amazon had best nip their counterfeiting problem in the bud. I’m now suspicious that several of my Amazon purchases, especially the ones that failed prematurely, are counterfeits. It will not serve Amazon or Bezos well if their customers are constantly wondering whether their purchases are the real thing.
5
I am a third-party seller on Amazon.com and sell many books from a US-based authorized book wholesaler. I agree that counterfeit items are a big issue on Amazon, but the idea that "It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way" and never checks the authenticity of items is flat-out false. Counterfeit claims can be made by trademark owners, publishers, or customers and often result in the flat-out banning of the counterfeit seller. The big mistake was Amazon allowing Chinese sellers on the marketplace in 2017-- since then there has been an influx of counterfeit items and so many new sellers that Amazon cannot police everything quickly enough. They seriously cracked down on fake reviews too, deleting tens of thousands of reviews. Even when my friend's mother left a review of an item I sold, they flagged and removed it (somehow knowing they were connected to me, so there could be bias) and threatened to shut-down my account if there were more. However, instead of purchasing reviews for themselves as immoral sellers did in the past, they now purchase reviews for competitors resulting in their accounts to be shut down. It's a complicated and flawed ecosystem, but has provided me with a great business- let's not forget the tens of thousands of small businesses who have greatly increased revenue from Amazon!
1
Amazon has also made some subtle changes that make it harder for customers to judge products on its site. For example, reviews used to say, “28 out of 132 people found this review helpful.” Now they only say, “28 people found this review helpful.” And then there is the proliferation of fake reviews that go along with fake products, and Amazon’s apparent lack of concern about them. Amazon says it’s focused on “customer service,” but that phrase really just means “deliver the package,” and nothing else.
I’ve cut down on Amazon purchases in recent months. For example, if I can order something from the manufacturer instead of Amazon, I do. If I can get a book from an independent bookstore, I do. A site called isbns.net will find copies of any (every?) book for sale, anywhere online.
But of course, what we really need here is government oversight and a solid dose of breaking up the tech giants. This means we need to vote for people who’ll get tough with them.
17
In brick and mortar retailing, a vendor that sells counterfeits can be padlocked and its inventories seized. Amazon has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which essentially protects web distributors from direct accountability. I think that if Amazon were forced to go completely dark any time a counterfeit book, recording, design, or product was found for sale on any Amazon web page, they’d have an algorithm to fix the problem in short order.
6
I avoid buying anything from Amazon unless I am unable to find it anywhere else. If more people would stop buying from them, that would help to break their monopoly. i won't hold my breath for that to happen.
Most people enjoy the benefits of buying online and completely ignore the long term consequences.
8
“We’d rather not be on Amazon,” Mr. Kelly said. “But we felt like we didn’t have a choice.”
This is the position I am in as an owner of a small business. For 21 years I sold directly to natural grocery stores all over the country, but in 2016 we saw our numbers dive as these stores saw a decline in customers buying from their supplements/body care sections. In 2017, we made the decision to go on Amazon. In less than a year, 40% of my business was on Amazon! We also had to stop selling to other businesses who might resell on Amazon because we came in direct competition with them. Fortunately, we are small and could easily do that, but I can see how it would be a problem for others who are more widely distributed.
Now instead of making relationships with stores/people all over the country we are studying how to be seen on Amazon. What a bore! It's not the reason I started this business.
Some time, maybe it's far in the future, there will be a price to pay for automatizing everything. Giants rarely stay giants over time.
6
once amazon domination is complete,
people will be spending even more time on their sofas
waiting for delivery trucks or rail vehicles to bring them
everything. or take them anywhere, if they still care to move.
no more POV's, which will probably decrease air pollution,
but plenty of energy needed to cool all the servers required
to store loads and loads and overloads of data.
meanwhile,
jeff bezos is on the moon preparing to save Earth from there.
2
It isn't just books. Clothes, toys, electronics are all knocked off and sold at ridiculously low prices.
We need to be wary as consumers and learn how to look for knock-offs vs. the real thing.
Lesson number one would be not looking for the cheapest and purchase items directly from the company or established specialty retailers.
5
Amazon must be held accountable for trafficing in stollen goods. This is criminal behavior, and should be met with fines and jail time for those involved. We continue to let the most powerful amongst us violate the law while punishing the weakest.
5
Amazon sells more than half the books in the U.S.!
Looking at the absolute monopoly that this company has become and my own part in it as a buyer of hundreds of books, I am sickened. How different is Jeff Bezos from Trump who knowingly does the wrong thing while lining his pockets with hard earned money from the rest of us? Lucky Amazon pays zero taxes too, huzzah!
It's time to go back to supporting our local libraries and bookstores. We are obviously paying the price of the giant discount (and now fake) bookseller, Amazon.
2
If you can't beat them, joint them. America must learn to make things cheaply and quickly.
If you want the real thing, borrow the book from a library if you don't need to own it. You'll save money too!
1
This is not only limited to books. Amazon is a black market for nutritional supplements as well, selling either stolen or counterfeit products from physician line companies. Very dangerous.
1
Our hypocrisy is unbelievable. First, you purchase everything at Walmart and then complain about its dominance and how it killed the local economy which it did. Then you purchase everything -and everything from toilet paper to diapers and books- on Amazon because it is cheap and convenient, and then complain about Amazon's dominance.This is not about some who always looks for ways to support the local simply because Amazon and the like lead to the destruction of local shops, jobs, and culture. But others please don't blame the monster and beg your corporate funded politicians to write a bill that breaks them down. If you're serious about corporate dominance, don't look for a solution elsewhere and simply look for local alternatives -unless you have to turn to Amazon because your local shops don't carry whatever you need urgently-, knowing that you'll end up paying more but supporting a lot. "Break them down" is an empty slogan. How? What would be the appropriate size? What is the ideal size of a corporation? How many competitors there should be on the market in an ideal situation? How will you limit the future growth of a corporation without violating its fundamental principles? So, even if the justice department says Google or Amazon are monopolies do you have any idea about the next step? No one does because it is a too complex problem. So, instead of shouting empty slogans do something and, again, keep in mind that corporations exist because you support them.
6
I’m glad that this story was written. It’s not just books. Amazon supports intellectual property theft as an operating strategy. Google the term “earbuds” or anything with a brand name and watch what happens. Hundreds of knock offs that are eerily similar to products we look for show up that are not them.
4
Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that.
1
@Bob Oh, funny. So, you think no one should have any plan?
An acquaintance of mine who works for the FAA as a research scientist has told me that Amazon has, for years, listed free government reports for sale, sometimes for absurd prices of $100 and up. For example, go to Amazon and, under Books, search on knecht weather. As of today I find several free FAA technical reports for sale at prices up to $137. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=knecht+weather&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss
4
I don't shop at stores that sell shoddy, counterfeit merchandise in the real world, so why would I shop at an online store that sells disreputable junk? So I can get it in 1-2 days with free shipping? No thanks. I like my neighborhood bookstores.
I never buy a book on Amazon. It can be done. Support your independent bookstore. Resist.
7
Amazon is a terrible thing and it’s making it so certain items are available nowhere else. What if Amazon is the only place you can find a water filter for your fridge and after ordering it arrives with some scuffs on it? Is it even new? How can you be sure. But you can’t buy it from the place you bought your fridge so every time you have a glass of water you think “jerks...”
1
Another problem with Amazon sellers is that often they don't have the title on hand but act as if they do. So-called "bookjakers." Ergodebooks is a prime example. They list on Amazon and Abebooks. But from what I have read of reviews about them and their ilk, is they never have the book, say they have shipped it and then don't respond to complaints. Companies like that ought to be investigated by the attorneys general in their states if not by the US Dept. of Justice.
3
@David - Call the FTC.
Personally, I'll always treasure my paperback copy of "Ulysses" from Amazon. The editorial bravery to cut James Joyce off mid-sentence just 37 pages in; breathtaking.
3
This problem is not limited to books. Amazon sells many third party electronic items that are listed as OEM but are actually cheap lower-quality knock-offs. Shame on Amazon for not policing better. I think the government needs to step in and break up these monopolies - they have too much control on e-commerce.
3
The root of the problem is that Amazon thinks that Amazon Marketplace and listings from non amazon sellers can function as some sort of ebay. However, people trust items on the site as if Amazon had personally vetted them. The site has been flooded in the past few years with fake items and unscrupulous sellers.
However, I have never had a problem with Amazon taking care of an issue when it arose. From complete refunds to replacements, with return shipping paid for by the seller, the issues are taken care of very quickly.
The issue is that buyers think they are buying something from Amazon when they are actually buying from sellers who are only using the Amazon platform. If you don't trust ebay sellers and don't know to look for seller ratings on Amazon, you are in for an ugly surprise.
1
There is so many cheap, cruddy and counterfeit goods on Amazon; I don't trust them. If they don't like my returns well they have themselves to blame.
If I were a seller I'd really be angry because all this stuff is driving down real prices so that only Amazon and the Post Office makes money.
I never realized how much fake stuff was coming out of China until recently. Fake coins, fake books, fake semiconductors, fake clothing, fake toothpaste, fake shoes, fake drugs, fake whatever! Amazon is the place to be for selling fakes.
I bought a bunch of Swarovski Crystal Christmas snowflake ornaments two years ago (without knowing first, but I already had one to compare). I called Swarovski and they seemed to not care. The seller put up a fight saying I had to send them back to Hong Kong. I said no he should provide me with a label to get them back.
But back to Amazon, there are no ethics at that company.
3
Ah, but perhaps we’ve already let Amazon become “too big to fail.”
3
I can't help but recall everyone -- this newspaper and much of its commentariat, the Dep of Justice, some ill-informed Washington DC judge Denise Cote, a venal, ridiculously overpaid corporate monitor, Mr. Bromwich and a $450 million fine -- piling on Apple because poor old Amazon and a handful of corporatized publishers (e.g., Hachette, Simon & Schuster) were afraid of competition from iBooks!
Just desserts.
1
Buyer beware. Always.
Wow, even I - a dyed in the wool Amazon boycotter - am amazed at the self-feeding loop this company has created. In order to stop counterfeited book sales the publisher is forced into cutting out ALL wholesalers and selling directly to the big A. Sadistic.
Years ago, Walmart attempted to create it's own bank. They weren't interested in full service banking, they only wanted to process their own credit card transactions - the fees merchants pay (and consumers are unaware of) in order to offer credit card sales. Thankfully regulators nixed the idea because the diversion of the processing fees would have de-stablized the existing banking world.
This tells us two things: 1) there's a heck of a lot of money to be made in credit card merchant fees, and 2) overseeing mega-corps is absolutely necessary today. Where are the regulators to put their foot down on this out of control tech companies whose me-first attitude is blindly suppported by consumers whose kindles buying philosophy is guided by 'cheaper'.
Stop buying 'print on demand' books, stop supporting 'the world is not enough' corporations and for pity sake support bricks and mortar stores before they are all subsumed by ego maniacs like Jeff Bezos.
4
So a million "bad actors" is a handful?
Sound a lot like fake art from eBay.
I submit that given the fact that we have the president we have, next we shall see Bezos jump in the race (if Oprah does not) and become president and shortly after he will be invested he will dissolve Congress and establish The American Empire. Moreover, The Emperor will write a new Bible, The Bezos Bible, which shall spell clearly "thou shall"...
And so our democracy goes to dogs...
1
Lots of people are mixing Amazon's two retail businesses into one, and using it as a convenient way to claim Amazon is complicit and should be sued, etc. If you bought a counterfeit item off Amazon, and it was shipped and *sold* by Amazon, then their supply chain is compromised. If you notify them, and they fail to act, then you can call them complicit. Third party vendors on Amazon, almost exactly like ebay's business model, are a whole different cup of tea. Amazon gives them a short leash initially to prove themselves. If they perform well (no, few complaints), they can sell more. If Amazon fails to punish abusive vendors in a timely manner, they are complicit. But, they rely on the consumer to provide feedback. This is the only cost effective way this type of 3rd party marketplace can operate and be profitable, just like on ebay. If you chose to purchase from the 3rd party marketplace, you have to assume this risk (and hopefully the responsibility of reporting abuse), but no one is forcing you to use it, and Amazon will definitely refund you if you have a bad experience. Asking Amazon to essentially be the Minority Report police, and predict or try to pre-filter vendor abuse, is essentially asking them to permanently close down the 3rd party vendor portion of their business. That's a legitimate opinion, but I'm guessing a lot of legitimate small businesses would disagree. Moral of the story - if worried about counterfeits, buy items sold directly by Amazon.
2
This is a great article, publishing what I've learned from personal experience over the past few years.
What the article DOESNT say is that outright theft is rampant on Amazon: I have ordered and paid for multiple Kindle books that turned out to be copies of Project Gutenberg FREE ebooks, complete with all the end matter staying it is a free book and illegal to sell it for money.
Some of these books were labeled as e version of Oxford World Classics editors. They weren't.
I've reported this to Amazon and Oxford, and they don't care. Project Gutenberg replied and acknowledged the problem, and thanked me for letting them know.
What else can you do? Except refuse to buy from Amazon anymore. Which, I don't.
5
It's been a dream of mine to open a bookstore cafe in my little town. Amazon is the reason it's a dream, and not something I'm truly striving for. Every time I think about it, it always comes down to "Amazon is cheaper." Also, I don't have money to start it. But still....
1
I used to have a blog about out of copyright books on Kindle that were free and were properly formatted. There were multiple versions of free books, but many had corrupt text and were unreadable or they were missing chapters. My blog was a service to help people find a fair copy of classic books.
The popular free titles were shadowed by costly duplicates trying to fool the undiscriminating buyer; as I would see titles that were free also selling for the price of new hardbacks.
I had to stop doing the blog because the quality free titles began to disappear. When I would check on titles I had blogged about, there would be a message that they were withdrawn pending investigation, or words to that effect. I concluded that the free books were being reported as having issues by the people who were selling the same title. However they did it, they eliminated their competition and me.
3
As a publisher, one of the problems is that people are not willing to pay for the actual cost of the production of books. Consumers themselves are driving this problem. Publishers regularly send out galleys to press, and these are sold on the black market, even at reputable book stores like The Strand in New York. Amazon multiplies this problem, just like tech does in many aspects of our lives. We all need to wake up to the realities we live in.
5
Though not currently a student, I often buy both new and used textbooks and other technical books for reference. It is very difficult to avoid Amazon, especially now that they own Abe Books. It is probably possible but you have to spend a lot of time doing it, and I, for one, don't have that time. I have learned to look very hard at what is for sale on Amazon, and to avoid so-called "international editions," which may or may not be authorized. Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein has written frequently about how antitrust enforcement has pretty much failed to evolve with the times and is ineffective in today's environment. He has written about Amazon in particular.
2
Amazon now knows how Walmart felt when every liberal institution in America loved to bash Walmart.
If you are smart enough to read, you should know if you buy a book from amazon it might come from a second party shipper and buyer beware.
Buyer beware? The law protects copyright and Amazon can prevent this from happening.
2
How on earth could they verify every book from a 3rd party sellers? If the 3rd party seller is caught and prosecuted I’m sure amazon would stop doing business with them but to ask them to verify every book sold is not practical. Definitely a first world problem.
@Prudence Spencer How does one "know" if a (to be purchased on Amazon) book might come from a 3rd party seller?
Nothing very different than when any other type of company owns an industry, but sadly it seems now NYT agenda is to throw punches at the one that's threatening its existence --sad to continue seeing articles used as a weapon in NYT agenda rather than objective analysis of what works and doesn't as industries evolve with technology.
Re: 3'rd readers pick, David, who writes "Once a monopoly is established and entrenched, the company no longer needs to worry about competition, maintaining a price edge, quality or service. Looks like we are there with Amazon"
NOT QUITE
Amazon is a global company, not just an US one
If you look at market data in Switzerland, a neutral country, that is a good test case on how Amazon and AliExpress (Alibaba) compete , you find
Sales 2017, Million Swiss Franks
Amazon 580
AliExpress 340
Growth Rate of Sales , in percent, per year 2016-2017
Amazon 20%
AliExpress 180%
That is, AliExpress sales are growing 9 times faster than
Amazons. This does not look good for Amazon.
Data
https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/alibaba-bereitet-schweizer-online-haendlern-mehr-sorgen-als-amazon-ld.1446775
1
Take a look at reviews for OTC medications and drugs. Now there's another in the series of these articles. Fake reviewers propounding snake oil for any ailment that will sell.
1
After reading this, who on earth would subscribe to Amazon's PillPack?
4
Anyone interested in how absurd AI Amazon is getting should google the times their platform sold:
1. Iphone cases with pictures of adults in diapers, toenail fungus, a woman getting botox injection, etc. Here: https://bit.ly/2QvegQO
2. Shirts that said "Keep Calm and Rape a lot" and "I love boiling girls" and many more.
They were all AI generated products and the toenail fungus cellphone case (yes, a case with a picture of toenail fungus) had a 5 star rating.
None of this would happen at your mom and pop shop.
1
The hands-off or washing of hands argument to not accepting responsibility for what is being sold, is the exact same argument the investment banks made to justify their involvement with AAA rated mortgage backed securities that later turned out to be junk. As Goldman Sachs put it “we just create the marketplace for buyers and sellers, and take no interest (responsibility) for the content what is being transacted.” Sort of like saying we are not drug dealers or drug users, we just provide a place where they can meet up, and we take a small cut of whatever is sold for providing the meeting place.
In domination of every market, without regard to "local" rules - - Amazon is destroying businesses, stores, the tax base for many a community.
At first it seemed to be to be a miracle of sorts - the capacity to link buyers with any possible object they wanted to purchase. It was similar to the seduction of Facebook - for free, communicate with anyone in the world! - based on rapacious greed and shrugging off any responsibility for any violations or use of their sites for fraud or abuse.
They set themselves up to be the ultimate middlemen. The pipeline, not the oil.
A so-called brick and mortar store located clearly in a given city and state and country, would be subject to laws. We have no legal structure to control these behemoths.
3
I have done business with Amazon for almost twenty years.
Have had only two problems, both of which were resolved expeditiously.
If you make a purchase and don't like it or it's not what authentic you can return it in thirty with [virtually] no questions asked.
As respects books; almost every book has reviews by purchasers many of whom are experts.
Once a monopoly is established and entrenched, the company no longer needs to worry about competition, maintaining a price edge, quality or service. Looks like we are there with Amazon. The fake reviews have turned me away from Amazon. I counted on the reviews to give me some sense of quality of product, whether it be a book or some gadget. Now to hear they don't police counterfeit products is just enough.
They, Borders and Barnes and Noble put out all the independent bookstores, cornered the market, went out of business and now we have fake reviews, a search engine instead of a real person and customer service which at best is a "chat" with someone or something.
429
@David The chat with “something” isn’t limited to Amazon. I recently had an online chat with a customer service representative for the NYT that made me wonder if I was communicating with AI instead of an actual human being.
44
@David, Independent bookstores are not dead, in fact we’re thriving. More stores are opening every year and customers are appreciating our community connections and personal customer service. Find your local indie at https://www.indiebound.org/indie-bookstore-finder.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-independent-bookstores-haved-thrived-in-spite-of-amazon-com
102
@David While I agree that the counterfeit issue is impacting publishers, I wouldn't agree that they have hurt independent booksellers.
BN and Borders were hurting independent book sellers long before Amazon. Amazon has given the small book sellers a platform to fight against bigger stores. It has given them a reach beyond their geographical location in satisfying the need for niche titles that are not viable to stock in large quantities by the cookie cutter stores like Barnes and Noble.
9
As a published book author, tell me again why I should continue writing, after what Amazon has done to wreck centuries of American publishing?
172
@Mike C.
Keep writing because there people out there who are still reading and supporting local bookstores.
20
@Laney - Above and beyond the piracy, Amazon has created a culture of readers who don't think they need to pay for content. I've had readers tell me they're doing me a favor by reading my pirated book...Because clearly I'm doing this to entertain them...and they were entertained for free. Um, no, I'm doing this to make a living.
No one asks my husband to engineer heating and cooling systems for free because he loves his work. Keep writing if your spouse carries your insurance or you have a fabulous day job. Keep writing because they keep giving you contracts and the advance money is better than nothing. Or just keep writing because you can't stop. That's the only reason any of us gets into this soul-sucking business anyway.
34
@Mike C.
Locally owned bookstores are making a comeback, as people crave face-to-face, as opposed to digital, interaction. They are new, "happening" spots, and the book sale marginal profits are propped up by the sales of other, compatible, products. Keep writing!
13
Copyright violations and intellectual property theft isn’t just an amazon issue. There are apps within the Apple App Store pirating poetry, literature etc. Apple doesn’t have a way to report this and leaves it up to authors & publishers to file a complaint through an entirely different portal. My point is that all these monopolistic online platforms have issues they are not inclined to address. They make it difficult by design with the consumer and the original property owner harmed while they pocket the profit. When reported on you get defensiveness and pr spin instead of change & accountability. It’s the tech mindset to deflect and defer, they are a blessing for humanity, don’t you know (sarcasm intended).
144
@John Chastain
It seems to me that a core issue is that intermediary vendors like Apple and Amazon are not held responsible for their products. They get to sell things that they don't make, and because they don't make them, they're not responsible for them. If that were to change, the monopolies might crash.
6
I was recently defrauded by an Amazon seller myself. I purchased an expensive "Nikon D750" camera body with an accessory kit. Past the normal return period I discovered that I had instead received a grey market Nikon D750K model intended for the Korean market. Aside from the fact that Nikon wouldn't honor a warranty on the product the D750K doesn't even have the same feature set as the D750, in particular it doesn't have Wi-Fi capability. When I contacted Amazon and demanded that they require the seller to either replace the body with the one I actually ordered or refund my money they rejected my claim. Not only that but the seller's ad remains on the site and any other buyer will be similarly scammed. Although it won't respond to individual complaints, anyone similarly duped by Amazon should file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (which can be done online).
304
@Dav Mar
I was considering another camera purchase. I just assume that any "good bye" on Amazon not from a known seller is grey market.
But the advice to file a formal complaint with the FTC is important to get the fraud on record.
18
Dispute the charge with your credit card company. When enough people do this Amazon will feel the pinch and maybe start to address the problem.
29
@Dav Mar
Have you considered filing a claim with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service? I had good results after getting a claim of mail fraud going.
https://www.uspis.gov/tips-prevention/mail-fraud/
22
This article is a comical example of what happens when a company is allowed to grow into a monopoly. Monopoly protections aren’t just about preventing a few people from becoming too wealthy. This situation is an entirely predictable result of enabling Amazon to achieve such a level of dominance. We can only cross our fingers that some day, companies that are actually reputable and not merely big and successful will come along and Amazon will be known as that crazy place full of counterfeits and scammers, because the company clearly doesn’t care.
148
The problem is that the barrier to entry for new players is very high. Amazon has one of the most recognized and valuable brands in the world, many households are locked in via Prime, Alexa, ... and don’t even search other places, Amazon has huge economies of scale on procurement, shipping and advertising costs, and intrusive methods of finding out what customers are in the market for.
They also monitor third party sales volumes and start offering successful products via Amazon proper.
14
@Liz
Actually, Amazon has lowered the barrier to entry in online sales even for some big brand brick and mortar merchants. Target for example... all online sales are fulfilled via Amazon. Small mom and pop at home businesses get instant exposure to a huge buyer market by simply setting up a storefront on Amazon.
Literally any merchant, even small mom and pop merchants, can set up shop and sell their products or services on Amazon.
And as time has passed... more and more of what is actually listed and sold on Amazon is done by 3rd partys... both big and small.. and world wide. Amazon provides the listing service for a fee and merchants love it because the get traffic due to Amazons brand strength and hence sell more product to more customers. Amazon simply charges a listing fee.. and even then only on actual sales.
Amazon will also offer full order fullfilment if the merchant wants.. hence selling product stored near Amazon facilities and drop shipped to Amazon on sale.. for shipping to the end customer by Amazon. The seller pays a higher fee for this type of sale... but benefits by the simplicity and speed of fulfilment of orders to customers... which generates positive reviews for the seller which generates trust and hence more sales.
1
@QTCatch10
Amazon has no monopoly here. They do have very large market share for selling via there websites for sure.
Amazon is actually anti-monopoly in that they will allow any independent seller to list and sell on their website as long as they meet the application process requirements and the terms and conditions to list products (or even services now) for sale on Amazon.com.
That said.. some merchants do complain that Amazon data analysis and automation can make it difficult to compete directly with Amazon pricing on the same product.... but as a long time Amazon customer my observation is smart sellers do exactly the same thing to Amazon.. undercutting whatever daily price Amazon is selling at.. by a small amount (we are talking cents, not dollars) to insure their listing pops to the top of all sellers for a particular item for that day.
Amazon does not want to be a monopoly in product sales... they simply want to be the 800 lb gorilla storefront on the internet. The only merchants they are actually harming with their business model are the big brick and mortar store fronts like Target, etc. But did you know that Targets online sales are all fulfilled by Amazon? See.. Target looked at the issue and instead of trying to compete directly like Walmart is trying with their online Storefront (which also allows 3rd party sales listings) Target instead leveraged the value and power of Amazons internet sales technology. Win win for the two companies.
3
The situation with classic books is terrible too, especially with ebooks. It often looks like you are buying a Penguin or Oxford edition and instead you end up with a badly OCR'd version. There are then tons of complaints in the comments on the bad copies and it looks like it's a comment on a legit publisher's version. I'd be so angry if I was publishing a book and the reviews under my book were for some terrible knockoff. It's time consuming for me sift through the sometimes dozens of different e-book options to find the edition published by a real publisher (Penguin, Oxford, Signet, etc.) with proofreading and footnotes. I wish these companies would offer their books directly on their web sites for download.
3
The problems of counterfeit material is not just books, but is also evident in electronics. If you search for a 256GB usb memory stick on Amazon, you will find some amazingly low prices. These are counterfeit. I first thought they were just rejects being sold as good, but, in fact, were special chips designed and fabricated to fool people and to LOOK at first insertion like they had the correct amount of memory. This occurs on eBay as well as Amazon and probably at some disreputable brick and mortar stores as well. The products include most commodity memory products.
88
@Bob McConnell
Yep.
Buy items on Amazon that are sold by Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon for a 3rd party merchant and Amazon will make good on any sale that ends up being something other then what was advertised, or was non-functional upon arrival. Amazons return and refund policies are among the most generous in the world.
On the other hand.. if you buy from a 3rd party listed on Amazon and Amazon is only providing listing services for said merchant... any issue with the product purchased is between the 3rd party seller and the buyer. Amazon may take action to ban a merchant for refusing to make good on something sold under misrepresentation (this is to protect the Amazon Brand) but they cannot force a nefarious seller to make good on any given sale.
Morale of the story... don't buy from a 3rd party seller on Amazon who sells/ships directly to the buyer... unless you know and trust the seller, or are willing to take a loss if things go wrong. Buy only sold or fulfilled by Amazon listings.
7
@Bob McConnell
Agree, massive quantities of counterfeit goods on Amazon - everything from books to batteries to combs. God help us if Amazon sells pharmaceuticals.
One point that many miss however is that Amazon combines stock of the same product (ASIN) into the same bin - so Seller A ships Amazon legitimate stock of Product X for Amazon fulfillment, Seller B ships fakes of X, both go into the same bin. And then when Customer S orders from Seller A (with Amazon fulfillment) he could actually get stock from Seller B which is fake - and the blowback will hit Seller A.
12
@Bob McConnell
"The problems of counterfeit material is not just books, but is also evident in electronics."
And its not just counterfeits. Companies from Stanley tools to whoever makes Barbies these days make and market items that, to the shopper's glance, are indistinguishable, but are not the same. There are truck stop Barbies and Walmart Barbies and FAO Schwarz Barbies, and they are not the same.
They are designed and packaged to help you believe they are.
I'm sure there's some positive, dynamic American business term for this deception, and I don't suppose it can really be called counterfeiting. Maybe just 'fraud'.
All the same, if Amazon is going to fall back on vague legalism to absolve itself of responsibility for the welfare of its customers, it is a worthless company, deserving of ignominy and a severe loss of income. One star, Jeff.
5
Support independent booksellers and book publishers. Books will cost you more, but you will push back against Amazon’s monopolization of the book industry and support your local businesses and economy at the same time.
260
@PRJ
Didn't you know?
Amazon has a full set of seller services for book writers and publishers. Amazon will produce and publish books written by authors in their turn-key fulfillment model for authors. Same is true for other media.
In this regard.. Amazon is providing services and sales support for authors who are unable to convince a publisher to print and sell their books. This lowers the barrier to entry for all writers. It does negatively impact brick and mortar stores who sell books, but it benefits both authors and readers of hard to find books.
9
@PRJDear PRJ, I want to support my local bookseller and I did, in Vancouver, for many years. Now there are 1 or 2 left. It is so sad. It was a huge joy of mine to walk in my neighborhood to my local bookstore and go in, chat with staff, and browse, until I found something terrific to read. That store perished a long time ago because of on line competition. Sad.
17
I have no love for Amazon (I work in publishing), but these strike me as isolated examples. In my 20 years of buying a lot of books, CDs and DVDs (new and used) from Amazon, I have never had issues with counterfeit/pirated material. Counterfeiting is an expected result of letting third parties sell on Amazon. In the few instances where there were quality issues, Amazon handled these things promptly. The bigger issue is books/ebooks with misleading titles -- i.e., books called "Great Gatsby" which are in fact just study guide summaries. The other issue is that lack of competition gives Amazon no incentive to pay better rates to publishers and third party sellers.
46
@NotKafka:
- no incentive to pay decent wages either.
at least in my [european] country, amazon staff
keep going on strike for better pay and working conditions.
- no incentive to pay proper taxes either, btw.
which i find as outrageous as the way they have to
trick or blackmail third party sellers into giving up
details relating to their [third party] customers.
16
Here is a thought. Instead of buying a book on Amazon, how about going to the Barnes and Noble site and buying the book there. If you can’t find it there it probably is not a legitimate title. Of course, it would be better to go to an actual book store but they don’t exist anymore. Which is likely what heralded the end of any aspect of our civilization worth saving.
1
I have received a few counterfeits. One in particular was so blurred I could hardly read it. It was called a "mass market paperback." What I really hate is receiving books that are defective or used, but listed as new. This happens frequently. I have called Amazon to complain about the growing problem. I speak to an outsourced polite person from a foreign country with a strong accent. They apologize profusely and tell me Amazon cares. I continue to receive poor quality merchandise. This is indeed, a growing problem.I receive fake or dated health and beauty products more and more. This is also true of tech stuff. It has affected my behavior, now I seek to find products elsewhere. I guess my experiences are no longer anecdotal.
119
@Helleborus
Me too! I ordered a “new” book for a graduation present and was a used library book! Not exactly an honest error. Book contained a bunch of strange pamphlets because seller is raising money for a children’s home. It made me feel manipulated, but I didn’t return the book. Will never order a used book from amazon again. I’ve received some strange stuff, often not new as advertised.
5
@Helleborus
You may have received a counterfeit copy, but there is nothing illicit about a book labelled a 'mass market paperback." This is the standard name for books that run about 4 x 1/8 to 7.25 inches in size. This is the format for many romance books, mysteries, thrillers etc.
@Liz I'm aware of that fact. Thank you for responding. :)
As the author of a book that was published by HarperCollins-India before it was released by an American publisher, I naively assumed that it would be simple to limit the sales of the Indian edition to Amazon.in, as the rights for that version were limited to the Subcontinent. When the American version came out, and I found third-party sellers selling the Indian edition, brand new, on Amazon's U.S. platform, I notified Amazon, still thinking that a company with so much digital savvy could easily step in and block sales of the Indian edition on its American website (each title, after all, has its own Amazon ID number). Amazon refused to do anything, not even sending a request to the third-party sellers that they desist from selling the book outside of its designated geographical market. I ended up doing that myself, threatening hollow legal action if the sellers refused to pull the Indian edition from their American "storefronts." Fortunately, after repeated emails, most did, but it felt like I had spent a bunch of time trying to do something that Amazon could have achieved instantly had it cared to do so. No brick-and-mortar bookstore would have been able to sell the Indian edition in the U.S.
Why does this matter? The Indian listing on amazon.com could have impacted the ability of the American publisher to earn back its investment on the book. And to me, it meant a difference between earning royalties in dollars versus rupees...
163
@Michael Benanav
I sell on Amazon. They CAN police things, but they choose not to, since that would entail additional staff time and expenses. Like most large companies, Customer Service is atomized so that you never speak to the same person twice and no one ever takes a personal interest. They are not judged by whether they solve your problem, but whether you go away and stop using up paid staff time. It’s a system designed to disempower and dehumanize it’s users, on both sides. And it does that really well!
15
@Michael Benanav
Most likely it was Indian merchants listing on US Amazon. They can do so and they DO in fact do so.
I'm not sure how Amazon can police this effectively. They sell millions of different items from 3rd parties.. and there is simply no way for them to audit every sale, much less the product (because the sellers will simply submit a "real" copy for Amazon approval, but actually ship fakes or non-localized publishing
Good rule of thumb... DO NOT publish initially in India.. you are just asking for issues of copies moving across borders as Indian merchants largely don't care about copyrights.. they just want sales.
1
@Stuart
Personally as a long time Prime shopper on Amazon, I have found their customer support to be very responsive and has always made things right for me.
Note: I also do not buy from direct selling 3rd party merchants on Amazon either.. unless I already know the merchant. Some merchants sell both direct and via Amazon Fulfillment. If I have bought before through Amazon Fulfillment then I know I can most likley safely buy from the same merchant direct... and have yet to be scammed.
5
Amazon is a textbook (no pun) case of what happens when growth at any cost is the only guiding philosophy. Errors in product listings abound; I recently gave up on trying to shop for a piece of computer equipment when every listing was in a fractured second-language English that failed to discharge its informational content.
The case of the Sanford Guide is an extreme example of the potential consequences of Amazon's laissez-faire (or too big to sweat the details) policies. As such, its credibility threatens to approach that of my local flea market where vendors sell inexpensive "Dinacell" batteries and "Sharpei" marking pens.
3
It's a fair bet that most of these counterfeit books originate in China, where intellectual property theft is not only not a crime, it's a way of life.
2
Counterfeit publishing is a relatively small piece of the pie.
None of this matters as long as people buy (anything) from Amazon or use Prime, and even then, they won’t take a big hit. They’re too dominant in too many industries (Whole Foods, Amazon Web Services - which a huge part of the internet runs on - Prime Video, etc.), and not enough people care to buy products from other retailers. Any temporary boycott won’t touch them, because they can financially easily ride it out.
People need to stop making excuses and make the effort to spend their money anywhere but Amazon - and, yes, it will often be a little more expensive, require a little more work, and giving up a degree of convenience - but the rest can only be impacted by government interference.
4
I have read most of the comments but so far haven't seen any mentioning the sweetheart deal that the USPS made with Amazon. I don't know much about it, and I think it was modified recently. But I have heard enough to suspect that this may actually be one thing our president is right about. A friend of mine with a mail-order book business says shipping costs alone tilt the playing field sharply toward Amazon.
1
@Maria Katalin - Without Amazon, the USPS would be a up a creek financially. Of course Amazon gets a volume discount! They are half of USPS's packages. Trump's comments actually caused Amazon to accelerate it's move into the shipping business. Just wait until the USPS loses 75% of it's Amazon business. Guess who will be picking up the massive loss of USPS revenue - you and I, the taxpayer!
1
As an author with business with selling books on Amazon, I can attest that the third party sellers are a huge problem and rip off for the authors and part of the very Amazon business model. Counterfeiting is merely scratching the surface of the many ways the third party sellers rip off the authors with the tacit BLESSING of AMAZON.
Third party sellers qualify and receive very big discounts from Amazon and can buy a new book for pennies compared to the original price set by the author and/or publisher. and then selling it for pennies, right next to the more expensive book sold by the publisher or author, seriously undercutting the original content creators.
However, third part sellers can get this big volume discount but only buy one or two books from each author. On top of it, the authors and small publishers are squeezed by Amazon into accepting their own rip off if they want wider distribution (which includes libraries and such). So it is a lose lose situation for authors.
There is no protection of the titles, and as soon as a book with a good title gets published and gets some traction, there are several new books with the same title, and different content. Amazon says only trademarks can protect titles, but trademarks are expensive and most real authors are impecunious.
4
Let's say that you "break up" Amazon in some way. Not obvious how you would do that but let's say that you did. So, now you have 10 different online booksellers with exactly the same issues but with less resources to fix them. My view is that the better idea is to change Amazon's legal liability when it sells a counterfeit book. Make it a 500 dollar fine to do it and allow the public to pore over the site looking for them. Create a class of bounty hunters and you will sting Amazon into action, get rid of many counterfeits and provide an interesting gig for a bunch of people. Right now Amazon has a perverse incentive - the more it can sell (even counterfeits) the more money it makes. Reorganize the incentives and change the behavior.
8
For years I have had a growing list of reasons for not buying from Amazon. The most recent on the list is their non-payment of taxes. Now this. I am astonished by the number of people I know who continue to buy from Amazon regardless of the continuing misbehavior of the company. Amazon doesn't care and it seems their customers don't either.
5
@Barbara__There are NO reasons to buy from Amazon.
More important to me is how Amazon affects climate change, and I think Amazon should be forthcoming about what they know about that.
1
Personally, I’ve had few issues with Amazon’s customer service in the 19 years I’ve been shopping with them. But that doesn’t mean I view the issues identified in this piece as inconsequential. In my experience the company is largely laissez faire in regards to dubious merch offered for sale (though they’ve been quick enough to refund in those instances where I’ve felt inclined to complain). I see many posters declaiming the need for government action (anti-trust litigation, break up, etc.). All I can say is, be careful what you wish for. Amazon, with all its faults, has brought an unrivaled bazaar of merch to your doorstep, books I might’ve spent a lifetime looking for, if I even knew they existed. Hard to imagine the blunt instrument of government intervention would somehow “improve” or “resolve” the issues cited here, without depriving many millions of people around the world access to this truly revolutionary innovation in retailing. This article, on the other hand, will almost certainly be read by executives at Amazon, if not Mr. Bezos himself. And, like an earlier NYT piece regarding Amazon’s cutthroat workplace culture, will almost certainty affect the way the company deals with the issues cited going forward. Bottom line, keep your shirts on people. And stop kvetching so much. The culture of complaint in these sidebars is crazy tiresome.
3
As Amazon grows its list of products, I find myself shopping there less. It is too difficult to sort through all of the junk to find what you actually want. Even if it costs a little more to shop elsewhere, it is worth the convenience factor to not have to agonize over too many options, many of which seem to be fakes or low-quality knockoffs.
33
Brick and mortar stores are responsible to insure that what they sell is not counterfeit. Amazon, eBay, and other etailers should have the same obligation.
Counterfeiting on the Amazon.com web site is a real problem, and certainly not just with books. Amazon should be policed by law enforcement, and should have civil liability for blatant counterfeiting.
Amazon is successful not only because they are convenient, but also because their prices are low. Until the past year they have not been required to pay sales taxes, and as noted, they allow counterfeiters to market on their web site as if they were real.
Time for the powers that be level the playing field and enforce the law.
16
Amazon.de is the only good way to order German language books. If I order from Hugendubel (a German bookstore), the shipping costs are so high that I'd need to order about 10 books to make it pay. I have purchased a Tolino, (a German e-reader), and can buy some books from Hugendubel that way, but not all books are licensed to be sold to the American market as an e-reader book, so I'm back to Amazon.de and buying a physical book. And, yes, if a book's price seems too good to be true, you are probably buying a fake. If you don't have the money for a real copy, visit your local library.
5
A pernicious part of "commingling" is that many "verified purchase" reviewers fail to identify the reseller that they bought from when complaining that the product is "counterfeit". I as a buyer have no clue as to which of the numerous resellers of any particular product is the culprit. Amazon, having added "verified purchase" could easily add "from xyz company" as that is already in the same database (note: for high value products likely to be counterfeited I buy only from Amazon, Amazon has a reliable supply chain. No resellers). Identifying resellers would help immensely-- and yes, there are rabbit hole side effects.
As for counterfeits... what do the sellers expect the platform owner to do other than respond to complaints? I read the complainers, expecting someone else to take care of counterfeits-- Amazon could strip off some low hanging fruit such as flagging titles which chronically get counterfeited, but the counterfeiters are endlessly creative in evading rules. I read the poster child examples in the article, and honestly can't figure out how a platform could determine that the contents of a book are plagiarized if the title and ISBN are different when each day thousands of books are appearing. Mix in used books... just keeping damage to a tolerable minimum is non-trivial with all interested parties working on the problem.
3
Hold Amazon liable. They don't care because they bear no responsibility and in fact profit from the negligence and fraud. Number 1 Section 230 of the internet decency communications act needs to be repealed - until that is done there is no incentive to change. Number 2 a law should be enacted so that all the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that have been damaged by Amazon can get fair compensation for Amazon negligence and fraud. If congress does not want to do that - then they should allow everyone (from mom and pop to brick and mortar to huge product and retailers) to counterfeit and or run fraudulent business with no negligence or liability like Amazon dies. All Amazon does is make billions by playing the abartrage between running a criminal operation but not being liable for it. It's not hard to make excessive profits and returns when you are exempt from the laws that your competitors have to follow.
7
"But Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells."
The solution here is to make Amazon liable for actual damages and hefty statutory damages for selling fakes through its platform.
Its approach will become less hands-off.
10
How does Amazon manage to successfully skirt all antitrust regulations? What if Boeing also had its own airline, its own petroleum company, owned all the companies that manufactured its parts or at least was the primary platform or conduit for their sale and distribution? Amazon is out of a control. I'm not a pro-government regulation kind of guy in most instances, but this is so out of bounds and so flagrantly beyond any parameters for creating healthy competition (in fact, is the deathknell of healthy competition) that it boggles the mind that this is permitted.
14
I'm not sure what how Amazon's "dominance" is an element of the counterfeiting issue Mr. Streitfeld describes. Does he think its behavior would be different if Barnes & Noble had remained a substantial competitor and, if so, why? Also, is the problem Mr. Streitfeld alleges confined to the third-party sellers that Amazon permits on its site or does he believe it extends to Amazon's own sales? That's an important distinction, because Amazon discloses the identity of the seller to prospective buyers.
I have been buying from Amazon for nearly 20 years and one of the reasons I do so is that problems with the products I receive are very rare and, when they occur, are promptly remedied. For example, recently I received a DVD from an Amazon third party seller that proved to have corrupted images and sound over about a third of its content -- this was the only problem I have had with an Amazon purchase in over a year -- a single email of complaint resulted in a full refund without any requirement that I return the DVD or otherwise substantiate the problem. I don't know of many other retailers that make it so easy to be compensated for a defective product.
Amazon gets my business because it combines low pricing, ease of use and reliability. Its success tells me that I am hardly alone in that view.
5
@Joel -- As the article explains, Amazon permits 3rd party sellers to engage in "commingling"--adding their products to the supply of products sold by Amazon. So the sale "by Amazon" doesn't really tell you anything about whether the product is coming from a reliable source.
I do agree with you that Amazon is good about remedying problems--when those problems are brought to their attention--but I don't think that is an adequate solution. It only worked well for you because (1) you were the original purchaser, so you could report it--which does not work if you are sending or receiving a gift through amazon since the gift recipient has no way to report it (2) it was not a time-sensitive purchase such as a birthday present (and time sensitivity is a reason many people use Prime); and (3) the fact that it was defective was obvious, not hidden. And, of course, even if you are satisfied with a counterfeit product and can never tell it is a fake, the real book author or manufacturer is still being cheated.
2
@Joel__"Amazon gets my business because it combines low pricing, ease of use and reliability. Its success tells me that I am hardly alone in that view."
That certainly does not mean you are right. 40% of Americans think Trump is doing a good job.
@L.A. Do you think other retailers don't have the same issues? I sometimes had the same type of issue with DVDs purchased from bricks and mortar retailers (you can't detect it until you play the disk, so seeing the actual product when you purchase it doesn't help); the only difference was that getting a refund was more difficult.
1
Unfettered capitalism is unAmerican. TR with his Trust Busting gave us the model for regulation.Regulating Super Corporations who refuse to do the right thing-Amazon, FB, Google for starters- is not a luxury but necessity.
If they are unable, unwilling to play nice with their customers and vendors then government must step in. This is not anti-capitalism but pro-democracy.
2
Most corporate giants have a finite life span. Sears was the Amazon of the late 19th and almost the entire 20th century. Amazon will almost certainly go the same way...just not in my lifetime.
2
Perhaps we need to think about federal legislation that make distributors jointly and severally liable for selling fakes. That would end this problem in a heartbeat.
2
Like many physicians I carried a copy of "Sanford" in my pocket on the wards for decades. The idea that it might now be untrustworthy, in large part due to indifference and avarice on the part of Amazon, just about sickens me.
How much is enough, Jeff?
23
@Richard Williams MD
That’s my question for Bezos too. Doesn’t he have enough money already, why does he feel the need to take over the world? He should devote some of his billions to setting ethical and quality assurance standards/oversight for vendors. He should be ashamed.
1
How's this for a solution? Before they're all gone, go to a local bookstore. The book you purchase might be a few bucks more than Amazon, but you'll get the real thing and support your local economy.
12
Someone else will come along and take out Amazon, its happened all throughout history. I do no business with Amazon at all since 2016 and never will again.
This article doesn't begin to describe the problem. Try going to Ebay. You will find the newest best sellers available for $5 to $10. When you order, you find it is an ebook. I bought one, thinking I must have been getting a used book. I notified Ebay and the publisher. No response from the publisher, a form email from Ebay. I haven't looked for a while, but for months the same guy was selling on Ebay. It is so easy to scan and digitize material today, I don't know how publishers and authors can make money.
1
Maybe it's time to start supporting small, local brick-and-mortar shops again for things like books, electronics, cosmetics, and other items that are duped by dubious sources and sold on Amazon.
I will happily support my local economy because where we spend our dollars makes a difference in the world.
14
@Laney
And that is exactly why there’s no need for governmental regulation. The market is a force far more powerful; our daily choices, where we spend our money is where we vote. And the more people are burned by those cooperations, the less they will pay them, the smaller they become.
1
@Sean
Nonsense. We've clearly seen that customers are bad at voting through their wallets. Customers vote for the path of least resistance rather than what's healthiest in the long run. Most people also buy the cheapest product even if it takes money out of the pocket of the creator and thereby destroys the ability for writers and artists to create. Customers are short sighted and selfish. What we have to show for their votes are McDonalds and pop culture garbage.
I began buying things from Amazon in '99, was a heavy Prime user, but I stopped doing so about 5 years ago. I hate what the company has become and the direction it's headed with too much power and influence. As a result I support my local businesses, donate to my local libraries, and have reduced my online purchases overall.
Other companies have stepped up too: B&N and Best Buy happily price match and ship their products quickly so there's nothing I miss about Amazon other than their exclusive TV shows.
7
So, copyright violations, trademark violations, intellectual property violations, patent violations...
It's all China's fault, except when it's actually an darling of American capitalism who is complicit in the crime.
15
No to worry folks! The "magic" of free market capitalism will sort it all out.
14
Reading this only reaffirms my belief that there is more actual value gained from blankly staring at passing clouds than reading most words people put down on blank pieces of paper. At least I know the clouds aren’t counterfeit and no ones getting ripped off when I do. Everyday another tech rip off story makes me want to keep my head up in the clouds all the time.
5
@John Doe Amazon owns the cloud too.
@John Doe They might be... They could be smoke belching from one of the zombie coal power plants being brought back to life by the Trump administration.
Maybe brick and mortar isn’t so bad after all.
15
Expecting a near monopoly to care about anything but becoming a complete monopoly is naive.
There are websites that can direct you to bookstores which offer better deals.
The only catch is not to expect quick delivery.
So what? You have nothing to lose but your chains.
3
@David Henry
I don't have Amazon Prime, so I get regular Amazon delivery. If I order on Amazon (*if*, although I try not to) they will hold my order for a week before they send me a notification that it's been shipped. In the meantime, if I order the same product on Ebay I will get it in an Amazon package, and it will ship immediately.
So I don't know if their customers notice, but shipping isn't fast without prime.
1
@Frieda Vizel Check out "bookfinder.com"
It's a gold mine.
A buyer cannot purchase from them because of their lack of publishing controls. They sell a lot of junk lately otherwise in addition. Their
management protocols are nonexistent or unenforced. The company is a big, overgrown pile of mismanagement.
4
Amazon is the prime example of what’s wrong with capitalism today (pun intended). A huge behemoth that accepts little to no responsibility for its business. And it is ironic to me that many of the same millennials who abhor climate change use Amazon constantly either out of ignorance or just not caring how that negatively effects the environment. It’s time to break up the world’s biggest monopoly.
2
@Mike L
I read a lot of essays by millennials on contemporary issues and many of them are about the adverse effect of the efficiency economy on our planet. Millenials aren't oblivious, but millenials also have a hard lot. My millenial neighbors with the newborn baby keep getting packaging at their door, and I saw them post a thank you sign to the delivery folks. Raising a child today is very, very hard, so I'm not one to judge.
"what happens"?
No one cares what happens. Look at who is President of the US and there is your answer.
16
I am torn, giving the obscene prices most books cost it seems the fakes may actually be a welcome sight.
Western IP and copyright law have always been a bit heavy handed. It will be nice to see them have to make some concessions to deal with new realities.
1
My first Amazon counterfeit book arrived last week. Its print is so small that it is unreadable. It is a rather obscure non fiction title of a long out of print book. I suspect it was printed on demand after someone scanned a library copy.
5
@poslug - it is happening with music CDs in a big way. And you bet I contacted Amazon - nutty times. When I received the CD I ordered - it was obviously pressed on demand.
My concern is not about the possibility of a misspelled author's name but it's about the complete manipulation of a book. The distortion of history, facts or science would transform a book, a source of reliable information, in a weapon designed to misinform and to mislead the masses.
12
Facebook: fake news
Google: fake sense of privacy
Amazon: fake books
Try paying at a store with a $50 bill. The cashier will inspect the bill to see if it's a counterfeit. If they deem it to be, they are compelled to keep it and report it to the authorities.
Amazon is complicit with counterfeiters since it knows its site is selling them and is not attempting to thwart the practice.
Authenticity is a commodity these days. Willful negligence should not be tolerated for the sake of cheaper prices.
23
Try using a $50 bill at a casino. If you want to see people scatter, simply drop a $50 at the Blacjack table, and whoosh! Everyone is gone. Albeit for different reasons (superstion), but people avoid them just the same.
Amazon will always beat brick and mortar stores on price. Independent and chain bookstores need to provide a USP, some point of difference, that will attract demand. Some stores are doing this well but not enough. Book-selling is a very different business now to what it was even a decade ago.
2
@Andrew Amazon can afford to not make a profit on books so they will most likely always beat brick and mortar store prices. It's really sad for BN and indie bookstores because books are a bookstore's main inventory. It's not the same for Amazon. That's why I don't buy books from Amazon anymore. We must keep our bookstores in business!
3
@Katie I agree but my point is that bookstores will not remain in business if they don't have a USP. Relying on customers willingly paying more to support brick and mortar stores is misplaced optimism.
@Andrew How about "you won't receive a counterfeit book ever" when buying from a brick and mortar? That seems like a good plan to me. One I can trust and put my faith in. Plus, I'm getting the added value of a better shopping experience in the store. And some yummy coffee.
1
One thing I’ve noticed about the ways companies use the internet (surely, I’m not alone in this regard): it often becomes nearly impossible how to figure out how to contact them. Links to Customer Service departments, much less their telephone numbers, often are difficult-to-impossible to ferret out. Or there may be links that become rabbit holes through attempts at communication disappear. The internet has become a shield for companies and other organizations. 21st century “Progress”, right?
30
My solution is to not buy books from Amazon. I shop their competitors. Amazon is fast becoming my last resort after checking other online outlets in general. Bezos is only as powerful as we are complicit. Ultimately, this monopoly should be broken up.
16
A small consolation perhaps, but at least Amazon does not (yet?) own this newspaper.
4
Counterfeit goods en masse. Creepy cams (Ring) and cans (Alexa). Confiscation of ebooks you've already purchased. Contempt for their employees. Crazy "1-Click" patents. The "Cloud". Jeff "I hate that guy in the White House but date Fox News honeys behind my wife's back" Bezos.
When you *say* you want Amazon to bring jobs to New York, you know in your heart you really don't.
15
Like all big systems, the parasites have moved in to suck the life out of it, leaving the customers and the honest vendors to suffer the consequences. The economics of scale work to reduce costs, but they also make it easier for liars and cheats.
There are too many crooks and corner-cutters in our society for an unregulated marketplace to remain fair and honest. Someone has to systematically weed them out and punish them or they will thrive at everyone else's expense.
9
Amazon's publishing wing often publishes books that are awful and loaded with typos. The conventional publishers, while risk-averse to excess, at least tend to publish books that are far higher in readability than the dreck I have bought from Amazon. I have stopped ordering books that Amazon publishes because I have been burned one too many times. I tend not to get self-published books, either. . . .
2
There's a simple solution to this problem: make all author's royalties collectable at the point of sale, and as a fixed percentage of sales price.
Because this issue has very little to do with author's rights and everything to do with the competition among various types of publishers to monopolize the license that they have bought from authors, often by legal but exploitative ways and by means of their own monopolistic powers.
Among other things, this change would result in authors being paid for each and every book of theirs sold, no matter who pirated it. It would mean that a copy sold for a ridiculously high sum would benefit the author to a greater degree, very much as artists in certain countries have a moral right to benefit from the resale of their artwork at high prices.
7
Legitimate sellers could go through the process of pleading with Amazon to boot a counterfeit seller, only to have the counterfeiter pop up a couple days later under a different name and have to start the process all over again. Maybe we should stop allowing Amazon to freely continue their policy of, "take a number and buzz off". I don't want to raise the spectre of anti-trust law-- yet-- but maybe it's time to pass laws that put the onus on Amazon in these cases. Make it more costly for Amazon to tolerate counterfeiters; force them to start policing themselves as a cheaper alternative to paying damages.
6
All these huge companies THINK that they can get by with algorithms instead of skin-and-blood human beings, and truth is always one of the many victims.
Actual proprietors of small businesses touch and check every book or tool or whatever they sell.
But completely faked products can come to diominate the Wild-West warehouses of Amazon.
In the same way, Facebook asks warehouses full of people to review the worst things ever put on videos, creating everything from emotional instability to fatal heart attacks for its far-too-few employees.
9
"This is not really negligence on Amazon's part. It is their business model." Oh? Is this phrase meant to placate Amazon's legal team? Of course it is negligence if it facilitates theft, and if Amazon persists after it has ample evidence of it occurring. For shame.
9
We had construction on our kitchen last month and splurged on a new oven. When the oven arrived it came with a 3 ounce sample of a stainless steel cleaner which turned out to be the best product I have ever used. Because the cleaner was not available in my town, I googled the product name in order to purchase another bottle. Amazon was, of course, the first name to pop up, on their site the price of a 16 ounce bottle was $75. That to me was prohibitive. Looking at the back of the little bottle was the phone number to contact the company. It turned out that the cleaner is only sold through their company and the cost? - $20. I order two bottles and they sent me a third one for free.
30
@lindap I have switched to direct from manufacturer sites for everything I used to buy on Amazon. Cheaper. Nicer people and no more nonsense with Amazon "customer service". And you know that what you're buying is genuine.
3
Amazon wants to pretend it is a billboard and not a retailer. But it is a retailer and always a retailer. It should be held liable for the defects in goods sold by third-party sellers. When they harm the consumer, they should be sued - bigly.
15
People copy art, dollar bills, books ...
But I don't see how that is Amazon's problem.
The Justice system is perfectly capable of doing that if you give them funding but Amazon ain't no cop and no plagiarism detector.
@Glariana:
Whether getting the product customers think they ordered is Amazon’s problem depends on whether the company cares about its reputation for reliability and competence. So far, on the evidence of this Times article, Amazon doesn’t.
1
@Glariana So why should authors place their books with them then? Because they are the 900-pound gorilla. They need to do better business.
1
@Glariana Amazon ain't no cop, Amazon is a fence, trafficking in stolen goods. Why we give them a pass on this is beyond my understanding.
2
Fortunately, we have two bookstores here in Concord, NH, a BAM and a truly local one, Gibson's. If I want a book, I can get it the same day and I can look it over to make sure it is what I want. BAM also has a "coffee" bar, and I have seen any number of people there using their free WiFi. Gibsons sponsors a book club, one of at least two here in town. And there is also a library for those who want free use of books. If I need a bigger bookstore, I only have to drive to Manchester for a Barnes and Noble. If I want to order something on line, I go to Barnes and Noble because I know it will be a legit copy.
7
Amazon will pay attention to a class-action suit from the Authors League, and all the major and indie publishers. Amazon still gets a cut of counterfeit sales, so a punitive fine/fee could make them go: oh yeah, this is really happening.
26
I suggest any online sales platform should be legally liable for carrying counterfeits. When they can be sued, they will pay attention.
26
I buy a LOT of books from Amazon, but it's frustrating. Some books come in terrible shape, sometimes the packaging is so incompetent that the book is damaged en route. Sometimes USPS deliveries don't show up and I am forced to wait weeks for a refund because they can't track the package.
But what is really unacceptable is that some comments that are critical or point out pricing issues (600% markup, anyone?) are not accepted for publication.
It takes a while to figure out that you have to be careful about whether you are dealing with an independent dealer or Amazon. There is no recourse when you are dealing with Amazon - it's like trying to catch a slippery pig.
The other thing that is becoming obvious is that Amazon is starting to do the same thing with independent sellers that it did with small neighborhood brick-and-mortar stores: Drive them out of business or force them to use their services for selling.
24
I often hear how government programs are bad because of unintended consequences. All large programs have unintended negative consequences. Even the bountiful and god-like “invisible hand of the free market” results in negative unintended consequences. Just look at how Uber is tearing the heart out of the taxi industry and fueling the narrow margins and socio-economic instability of the gig economy. But I guess when a select few people are getting filthy rich it’s ok?
12
@Mark
The KEY difference is that when business makes mistakes, the justice system can act to fix things.
BUT when government does things scandalously badly, the citizen and the group have no idea whether any act will ever come to remediate that wrong.
When Ku Klux Klan Dems murdered someone, there was a US Attorney Jefferson Sessions to put a man on death row.
But when states refused to register black Americans to vote, that took decades to change.
Thus, you ALWAYS want gov't doing as little as possible.
@The Observer
Who said anything about business making mistakes? Who said anything about the only problem being the legality of business practices? Many of these practices are purposeful and legal.
Large systems that are put in place rapidly cause unintended consequences. There are avenues for course correction for both public and private systems. What your saying is just patently untrue.
And any argument using superlatives like EVERYONE and "ALWAYS" (regardless of the author's use of capitalization) is automatically smacks of some agenda.
This is the problem with a business monopoly.
There’s no justification in Amazon’s excuses. Think of all the business in America which would put lives at risk if they claimed they could not protect their supply chain. Do automakers sell us cars with sub-standard steel because “it’s the supply chain’s fault?” Does Home Depot sell defective building supplies and blame their supply chain? No!
Every other industry, including retail, manages to protect its supply chain. Of course Amazon could do this as well. Amazon’s blame of their suppliers is simply profit-driven, and nothing more.
29
@Marshall - You are, for the most part, comparing apples to oranges. 3rd party marketplace sellers on Amazon are not comparable to a car company's supply chain, or even Home Depot's products. Amazon is solely the platform for other companies to sell, like a flea market. They obviously have a responsibility to remove products and vendors that violate laws, etc., when notified or if they realize it themselves.
1
@Character Counts at a local flea market, the RCMP raided a vendor selling counterfeit goods. Why is the FBI not involved in shutting down these Amazon shams?
3
Mr. Counts, I could not disagree more. Counterfeit goods are stollen property. Amazon sells it. Amazon makes money. Amazon committed a crime.
2
How can a store actually tell if a book is a counterfeit?
@Mannyv
Publisher websites and by ISBN. They list all legit forms of books they publish, including different languages.
As a general stereotypical rule Chinese/Indian editions are usually counterfeit or printed independently from stolen PDFs. The dead giveaway is the really cheap price in comparison to all other versions of the book.
4
That is really not that hard. You look. The question you mean to ask is, "how can Amazon look at all the books they sell?" I know that an employee looks at every book I buy at a bookstore.
1
Amazon doesn't care there are counterfeit books or that writers take a hit, they don't care that many wonderful bookstores have gone out of business. Their business practices speak for themselves and because of it I've never used them. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a revolving door of convenience is everything. Until the consumer speaks with their money and invests in shopping elsewhere Amazon will be King.
14
I have lived in the same small town for over 30 years. There have always been bookstores here, both indies, and for many years, a Borders. We now have none. The closest requires a a 60-mile round trip. Browsing for new authors online is difficult, since I see the same books and the same authors displayed over and over, sometimes for months if the book or author is a bestseller.
My local library has directed most of its resources into computer services primarily designed for students. I quit visiting it years ago because of the lack of new books and the noise level created by the students.
I’ve been burned by Amazon’s self-publishing platform many times, since these books are displayed in the same way that edited books from large publishing houses are. I’ve also lost any and all confidence in Amazon’s reviews. The amount of time I have to spend researching the provenance of a product, the seller, the seller’s shipping and return policies, etc., has become a burden. I used to spend thousands of dollars a year at Amazon, but I now buy only a handful of products from them that I cannot find anywhere else.
I have made this deliberate effort to avoid Amazon, but the result is that my choices for some things have become limited. As a voracious reader, the difficulty around books is the most painful. For those in large cities I suspect this isn’t quite the same problem as it is for those of us in more rural areas.
24
@Crane
Does your library network have inter-library loans, so that you're not dependent on your local selection?
Getting a e-reader allows you to borrow electronic books from the library on your device. Project Gutenberg has millions of classics available for free download because the copyright has expired.
8
@Crane When I can't find a book at a local indie bookstore, I usually order from Powell's in Portland. Great selection, combination of new and used books, and a responsibly-run business.
7
@Viv Thanks, I'll check out Proj Gut. Audiobooks have proved a great resource for me, too. Sadly, browsing in a physical bookstore used to be one of my favorite pleasures, and I just miss it.
3
Both Amazon and Ingram could use technology to detect copyright infringement. Resellers could be better policed. The burden should be on the seller to answer any violations reported and Amazon should bear the burden of creating a reporting system.
This is a completely unacceptable status quo.
11
I have never been an Amazon Prime member. I will go a block or more out of my way to patronize my local mom and pop shops.
Yes, there are some items that you might not be able to get locally...
But many of my friends and neighbors get everyday items delivered to their door (paper towels, toilet paper, cleaning supplies). I explain to them how bad it is for our environment which they acknowledge, but don’t want to give up the convenience of not having to walk a couple of blocks and knowing it will be on their door step.
This makes me sad for the future.
12
@Anna "A block or more out of my way..." Out here in flyover country (NY state, I might add) we have to travel 75 miles to reach a decent retail area. I cannot buy a nice suit, pair of dress shoes or quality sweater in my hometown. There is no bookstore in the entire county or the neighboring county. Even in major cities (including NYC) big box chains have replaced most of the mom and pop stores. With Amazon I don't have to wander around Walmart or Home Depot, not get any customer service, and not find half of what I am looking for. I am grateful for Amazon.
6
@Anna In most parts of the country (excluding NYC, where we both live) people who purchase everyday items locally drive to the store, load their purchases in their car and drive back home. Why is that so much better for the environment than having the product delivered directly to their home, bypassing the local store?
3
People who march in the streets about climate change are happy to order everything including books and food from Amazon and other outlets thus requiring gasoline or diesel powered trucks to bring this tings to their homes. These items could be purchased from shops locally thus creating jobs and supporting small businesses that support humans who need jobs instead of a billionaire who doesn’t pay taxes!
We are shooting ourselves in the foot.
27
@Justice Holmes
You really think you can find a copy of "The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy" locally?
3
@David
To be fair, medical reference manuals should be available for free from local medical associations. Hefty membership fees should pay for something useful.
1
@Justice Holmes
So how do you think the products in local shops get there? How do you get to your local shops to buy the generally pretty limited choices they have? FedEx and UPS provide lots of local good, well paid union jobs.
2
“This is not really negligence on Amazon’s part. It is the company’s business model.” No. The company’s business model IS negligence.
27
For those complaining of fake reviews, I totally get it. Estimates are that 50+% of all reviews online are fake. This isn't an Amazon problem, it's an internet problem. Amazon just happens to have a ton of reviews because they sell a ton of stuff. Go look at apartment ratings, or other vendors, it's the same story. Property owners propping up their ratings - it's so obvious. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to prevent them. You are the best line of the defense. I rarely read the 5-star reviews. If someone is glowing about a product, not a negative thing to say, it's a huge red flag for me. The (most likely) authentic reviews will point out pros and cons.
4
How is Amazon not held responsible. They cannot just claim to be a pass thru with no accountability. Seems they are also a monopoly when it comes to books, in addition to other items. If a store sells stolen merchandise, they are responsible. If street vendors sell knockoff designer clothes, they are responsible. Tired of tech companies reach and lack of ethics; Amazon is basically a tech company.
18
I sold books on Amazon for a while. Counterfeits are a tiny part of the problems with the platform, which is used, with Amazon's blessing, by many of the largest sellers simply to rip customers off. Because Amazon has no cataloguing system, only a search engine, sellers create multiple products pages for a single book, each responding to quirks in a search, in order to create the illusion of scarcity & raise the price. Many sellers--some of the largest-- do not even have the books they are offering; they simply have a program that tells them when the price in one place (say, German Amazon or British ebay or wherever) is lower than Amazon's going price; it sells the book at Amazon's price & has the cheaper one shipped to the customer. There are many other issues--there are lots of rules to protect Amazon, but the platform is otherwise lawless.
9
@Martin I am an author and I have seen books that I haven't even written yet offered as in stock at Amazon. I often thought I could save my self the trouble and just buy my book instead of writing it!
16
@Jean
I'm sure Amazon would be pleased if you did :-)
I once bought a used book in "good condition" from Amazon. When I received it, it was obvious from the poor condition that someone had picked it out of a dumpster in back of a library that had disposed of it. It was falling apart.
Two other things that have kept me from buying on Amazon:
1. They have often said something was in stock, until some time after the purchase: "we're sorry--your item is back-ordered." Their strategy sometimes seems to be to ge the sale first, then worry about the details later.
2. Amazon is definitely NOT the cheapest marketplace out there. Too many people assume that it is, though, and are paying too much for their good. Walmart does the same thing, though--they SAY they are the lowest price and say it so often everyone assumes it to be the case.
Shop around.
9
Since we can't stop "The Everything Store" from selling everything, it's up to publishers and copyright holders to monitor the marketplace for piracy, not Amazon. But the pirated medical book is a frightening example of the consequences, and it could happen with other kinds of books that give advice. It's clear that a marketplace that's open to all sellers doesn't work. They have to do some kind of quality control. Amazon could make it easier for people to report pirated editions. Every time I've had a customer service issue, I've had to search all over the site until I found an email address or webpage to contract them.
6
@debbie carter. I agree. The Amazon website has become impenetrable when there’s a problem, compounded by a frequent lack of access to product sources.
4
@Debbie Carter As a publisher there isn't really a way to monitor the stock that is offered on Amazon. We sell books to wholesalers, bookstores and individuals and we don't have access to the information about the stock for sale. We do look for pirated editions, but if they comingle their offerings with legitimate listings we can't know what is pirated and what is resold.
3
@Debbie Carter
If a brick and mortar store is selling stolen goods--that is a crime and that store would face consequences. Why should an online retailer like Amazon be different, even if it's a host for sellers or resellers. It is presenting the book as the real thing--Amazon is as the over arching interface that customer have with a seller.
20
There is a lot of weird stuff going on at Amazon. We’re both writers, and not long ago I began seeing some Amazon resellers offering copies of a novel of mine, published last year, at a discount, with, they said, remainder stamps on their covers. I checked with my publisher, who assured me the book hadn’t been remaindered. I posted my discovery on an Author’s Guild forum and found I wasn't the only one to whom this had happened. Now I suspect someone has been selling counterfeits. Of course, this would mean not only less revenue for me and my publisher, but reputational damage, since the book’s actual sales wouldn’t be reflected on the publisher’s books.
79
It’s not just books! Its lots of things. The latest for me was eye care... you can not trust what you’re getting from Amazon, so I’m very cautious now, and read through all the 1 star reviews before making a purchase.
7
The problem with Amazon and counterfeits is very widespread in the system - and its not just books either. Board games have the same problem - as do a bunch of other consumer items.
As such I've stopped buying books, board games, and other easily counterfeited items from Amazon altogether - its just not worth the hassle worrying about whether you'll get substandard products, and the time/pain of returning it and reordering again.
I'll also add that the fulfilled by Amazon system also means you can get fakes intermingled with real items even if you purchase from Amazon directly, as they have lost control of their supply chain!
9
Amazon's entire approach is based on the notion that "only the strong survive."
--If, as a seller, you cannot afford a lawyer to contest a Chinese counterfeit of an item for which you hold the patent, you are out of luck.
--If you cannot afford to lose $975 when a brand new computer that you ship to a customer mysteriously "disappears" from their front porch, you are out of luck.
--If you cannot afford to lose $1300 when a customer asks to return an item and instead of the brand new watch that you shipped, you receive the same watch, but one that is 15 years old and scratched up, you are out of luck.
--If, as a buyer, you are not happy that the stereo system you ordered is being drop shipped (shipped from another, less reliable merchant because the merchant from whom you ordered never carried the item in his inventory in the first place but did not advertise that fact) you are out of luck.
These sort of scenarios are an everyday occurrence for honest, legitimate sellers and buyers on Amazon.
36
Some will recall what happened when Walmart decimated brick and mortar retailers two decades ago -- large and small retailers across the USA. The thing is -- Walmart got away with it with little if any repercussions to Walmart's business plan. Unless anti-trust steps in (unlikely these days), Amazon will continue to do "legally" whatever it wants. As will Google and Facebook. These corporations have lawyers making sure of it.
18
It's not just books. The whole brand and platform is less appealing than it used to be. Rarely anymore is an item that you might want actually sold by Amazon proper but instead by a galaxy of 3rd party providers. Further, Amazon has so many apparently confrontational relationships with brands and companies that some products are simply not offered or carried while they duke it out (not unlike when cable and satellite companies fight with channels for carriage).
31
Time for a class action lawsuit against Amazon...they should have hired a full-time staff to root out counterfeiting. It really is the wild wild west, and in the future will likely discourage book authors from even writing.
7
With Amazon, buyer beware. I'm sure there are counterfeits in cleaning products, skin care, cosmetics and so much more in addition to books. Amazon is a behemoth that is ripe for fraud and fakes.
33
@Andrew
To Amazon's credit, the company has a pretty rigorous compliance regimen -- including FDA approval -- when it comes to health and beauty products. That is not to say that there is not corruption here as well. But it is a lot less likely than in other Amazon departments (books, etc.)
1
Amazon is a public utility which should be regulated as such. Ditto Google and Facebook.
8
@MKR
A utility provides a service that is necessary for life in society. None of these companies provide a service (advertising, in the case of Google and Facebook, retail, in Amazon's case) are even remotely necessary. I happily live my life without interacting with any of those companies.
1
Shop locally, at independent bookstores if you are lucky enough to have one nearby. If you don't try to find what you need on Shakespeare & Co. Failing that, anywhere besides Amazon. From my perspective, the only value Amazon provides is to those who for one reason or another are unable to get out and about.
20
Yes, Andy! Keep our independent book stores alive. I live in a small town that supports an excellent Indy book store and at least two used book stores. If I can’t find what I want, I ask them to order it for me. It will cost more than what I can find on Amazon, but I believe it’s well worth the price to support a local business over a mega-corporation that doesn’t care about its customers enough to police the products they offer.
14
@Andy
"From my perspective, the only value Amazon provides is to those who for one reason or another are unable to get out and about."
In my opinion that is a pretty narrow set of criteria. Amazon has many, many flaws -- see my posts here today -- but for many products, Amazon provides an excellent arena for price competition.
3
@Andy I'm pretty much unable to get out and about, but I have found plenty of online sources for what I need that are far superior to Amazon. Biblio or B&N for books, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and hundreds of small businesses with their own websites, all do a better job than Amazon does nowadays. It's time for people who are housebound or otherwise unable to shop locally to broaden their internet horizons.
2
Amazon should allow consumers to easily flag
- reviews that do not relate to the product being reviewed, which has become a huge problem for items with many seemingly strong reviews. It is clear that whatever mechanism Amazon has for reviewing reviews doesn’t detect them, yet they will refuse to post a review pointing this out.
- counterfeits, which also are called out by reviewers.
14
@A
Amazon does in fact have a mechanism to flag such reviews. The problem is that Amazon does not act on the information it receives.
18
I use amazon, now, as a shopping list and actually purchase the books at a bookstore which opened in my neighborhood. The staff know books and will order anything I want. I pay a little more but it is supporting local business which employees local workers. I’ve pledged myself to buying a book a month.
13
@Herbert Gingold Exactly. I preview the book on Amazon, then I order it from my excellent local indie bookstore.
2
@Herbert Gingold
The staff at your local bookstore are as likely to receive a counterfeit as you are.
When your excuse for letting the myriad of problems that crop up with Amazon (counterfeiting, dangerous products, shoddy wares) is basically “Well, it’s a big company and it’s super difficult to ensure everything is perfect... but we really do sorta care...” you’ve basically outgrown your ability to maintain integrity, quality and any reason to trust you.
This is true for any “Mega-corporation”, it’s all about growth, growth, growth... it doesn’t matter if the brand is rotting from the inside, as long as it looks bigger on the outside... investors don’t care what the brand does or sells, as long as it seems to be growing... which unless we start selling to other civilizations out there in the galaxy, kinda seems unsustainable for any great length of time... but hey, it’s big business, who cares... right?
33
In addition, Amazon sells books that are plagiarized from online creators—their posts (recipes for example) gathered and packaged into a print book with a fake author (and fake author photo!!) to make it look “real.” Fake reviews sell the book. The whole thing is cheap and disgusting. If Amazon wanted to do something about it they would be why should they care if they are making money. I can’t wait till the next big thing blows Amazon up.
8
I used to sell on Amazon, and one day may return to doing so. But I left precisely because of the scams that are perpetrated every single day by buyers and sellers alike. This article documents just one of hundreds of such horror stories of intellectual property theft that anyone can read about at the Amazon seller forums here:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/
Every day, hundreds of new third party sellers from China somehow manage to get their accounts approved. These same sellers, who for all the world appear to have infiltrated into Amazon's software, then proceed to steal wholesale the databases of other legitimate sellers; because these Chinese individuals do not have anything in stock, they collect money but do not ship. Or they ship counterfeit items.
The icing on the cake: your tax dollars subsidize the discount postage rates that Chinese "sellers" have to pay to get their items to the USA.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-usps-epacket-gives-postal-subsidies-to-chinese-e-commerce-merchants-to-ship-to-the-usa-cheap/
The situation is out of control and for some reason Amazon is not getting involved.
Some sort of USG investigation clearly is in order.
38
As one of the earliest computer and network junkies, I was an Amazon enthusiast from the beginning. I was even a shareholder at one point. When they were small and struggling to make it all work, they were great. Jeff Bezos would even speak to entrepreneur groups and encourage others.
But it appears that Lord Acton's law -- "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" is immutable. In an almost perfectly proportional way, the value and service Amazon provides has eroded as their market power has increased.
Jeff Bezos deserves to be rewarded for creating Amazon. He does not deserve to have absolute power over commerce.
I have resolutely resisted their "lock 'em in" strategy, Prime, and I look for different sources today. But that solution is a weak substitute for what really needs to be done. We, the people, need to root out monopoly power again. (And not just with Amazon.)
Back when Tennessee still elected Democrats to the Senate (and Republicans did not enjoy a political version of monopoly power they have there now), Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver wrote, "In a Few Hands: Monopoly Power in America". It's worth reading today.
Make sure it's not a counterfeit copy.
49
Life without Amazon is easy. I closed my account with them over a year ago after a run of bad service, receipt of counterfeits (hairbrushes, specifically) & confirmation of delivery for items that were "completely destroyed" by the shipping company & were never going to arrive. When I contacted them re: these issues, Amazon offered me $5 credit for my trouble--this after about a decade of spending thousands of $ with them every year. I have been able to find what I need elsewhere with little to no trouble. It is dangerous to make any company too big to care & it is stupid to complain about a monster while continuing to feed it. Amazon's success is due largely to consumer laziness & awareness of nothing but their own bottom lines. There are larger issues at stake here. At this point, Amazon actually makes Walmart look good & that is scary indeed.
9
As always, ask your doctor or pharmacist.
1
Suffice it to say I've never spent so much as a dime on Amazon's website . Never so much as darkened the doorstep of Whole Foods since Amazon bought it ..... and have no intention of going within a 100 yards of any of their brick and mortar bookstores .
Why you might ask ? Though late to the party and barely scratching the surface of all Amazons misdeeds ... this article pretty much sums my attitude up
That being ; Your checkbook / credit card and your unwillingness to use them with oligarchic entities such as Amazon etc is the stringiest weapon you have ... especially in light of the fact that the US government despite anti trust laws .. copyright laws etc isn't doing a goram thing when it comes to the likes of Amazon ,Google etc
Support your LOCAL bookstores / businesses ..... we do !
24
@TJ Martin Good for you! Me, too. I'm voting entirely with my wallet. When enough of us have had it, maybe they'll notice.
1
I like Amazon's convenience. I'm probably single-handedly destroying the environment by ordering so many stupid little items to save me a trip to the store. But yeah, I get counterfeit stuff from them all the time. Batteries, software, power tools, other random stuff. If brand and quality matter, best to buy it at a brick and mortar store so you can see it first.
Why doesn't Amazon institute a rating system for its vendors, like eBay? I get counterfeit stuff there too but at least I can ding the vendor with a negative review and rating when they do it to me. The bad actors may come and go, but the good ones will build up a good reputation and help guide your buying decision.
4
@Jim Jernigan - There is a ratings system for vendors on Amazon. And, you can report abuses by vendors. After researching being a seller at one point, they are pretty strict on their sellers (just like ebay has become) - sometimes intolerably strict. And when ebay or Amazon boots you, good luck getting another account. They use all the info they have accumulated on you (and it's a lot) to cross-reference and prevent bad sellers from opening new accounts.
2
@Jim Jernigan
How convenient is it to get counterfeit items instead of the real ones you were charged for? Seattle has bookstores (one in Pioneer Square) as does Redmond which has a Barnes and Noble. (I used to live there and was in Seattle and Redmond three weeks ago). The traffic is a nightmare now and seeing highrise buildings in Redmond, which was a sleepy country town when I first moved there in 1960, is a shock. But the Redmond town center has much to offer and it is healthy to get out of the house and off of the computer now and then. Try hiking in Marymoor Park or Farrell-McWhirter. At least they haven't been ruined yet.
1
I don't see Amazon as the culprit here. They appear to be removing counterfeits as soon as notified, and banning the abuser. What else can they do? It's the nature of the beast. The authors need to basically be their own daily detectives, and keep tabs on possible counterfeiting. As long as Amazon reacts quickly and decisively, I don't think they are a bad actor. Maybe authors need to have authenticity numbers or holograms on their books, so quick checks can be performed (both by Amazon, the consumer, or requested by author).
As far as Amazon taking over the world (and they are spread far more broadly than most people think - AWS comes to mind), it doesn't scare me, as of right now, because it is unraveling old industries that never had competitive prices (at least to the end consumer), like shipping companies. As far as their retail aspect, well, we've had Walmart for how long? Consumers will always go where the customer service is good, convenience is good, and prices are best. Their business model is pretty simple on that front - anyone can challenge them, and have (alibaba, walmart, google express, etc). Amazon's key advantage is their logistics technology, much hidden "behind the curtain" at warehouses. They are as much a logistics company as a retail company, so expanding into shipping was natural and expected. Many B&M stores were just way too slow to realize how e-commerce would change the retail landscape, and how to adapt (think Sears!).
2
Exact same thing happened with my two POD books. There were over 20 companies selling illegal copies, Amazon was even one of the counterfeit resellers! It took over six calls and finally a threatening lawyer letter and call for them to bother with me. It was an eye-opening experience into the black hole of Amazon’s grip. I have since just removed my books from their site and offer them on my own. Many fewer sales, but hey, I wasn’t getting any revenues from Amazon anyway.
7
The solution to all of the internet's ills, from fake books to hate speech is the same: force content platforms to take responsibility for what they publish by requiring a waiting period between uploading content and publishing that content and requiring the platforms to actually vet every file uploaded to their platform before making it available to the public. I know that sounds crazy but it's exactly how traditional publishing and broadcasting has always worked. You couldn't just send a video to a TV station and expect them to air it immediately without looking at it first so why do we allow YouTube to broadcast our videos the very second we upload them? Same with books. No self respecting publisher would have published a book without reading it first, yet now Amazon does exactly that at a scale so vast as to dwarf traditional publishers and booksellers.
The Internet is broken because we've assumed that anything other than allowing instant and infinite availability of whatever a user uploads would lead to an apocalyptic end to the Internet, and there once was a time when that made sense. But now that three giant companies dominate the entire internet, the days of instant publishing should come to an end and platforms should be treated the same as broadcast television.
Television has always been highly censored, and with good reason. Yet we seem to think that censoring the internet would not only be impossible but would be unamerican. How did we get here?!
33
@Matt D
Well said.
1
We are again learning the hard way that GOP and right-wing mythology and dogma are disastrous in practice.
America and the world is a better place after the forced dissolution of the Standard Oil company, American Tobacco, and Bell Telephone. The consent decree that reigned in IBM helped our modern economy enormously.
All of us would be much less vulnerable to malware and the digital world would be a much stronger place if the George W. Bush administration -- together with an already politicized Court system -- had not neutered and then blocked the much-needed breakup of Microsoft.
Large corporations, unfettered by government regulation, evolve into vicious monopolies. That is a simple fact that emerges from well-documented mathematics of how networks (in this case networks of companies) behave. It is very similar to the corresponding fact that an economy unfettered by government regulation will evolve into a wealh distribution with a handful of very wealthy individuals and an enormous "tail" of people with almost nothing.
The GOP is a cult whose followers religiously and passionately deny these basic facts in favor of GOP dogma that government is always bad (except when said government acts on behalf of the uber wealthy).
Amazon, Google, and Facebook need to be broken up. The American government needs to perform its much-needed duty to regulate the economy for the benefit of all of us.
8
@BrooklineTom
Interestingly, one commenter to this column wants the government to act against Amazon while most of his comments to other articles are critical of the government acting on behalf of citizens!
1
I no longer fully trust Amazon to sell me a legitimate good of any type (digital or physical). Fake reviews and the potential of counterfeits have nearly stopped me in my tracks from purchasing there. Now I try to buy from local merchants in my area as I know they have a vested interest in selling me legitimate goods. Amazon appears not to have an interest in doing so.
28
Counterfeiting is a small problem. Too much power isn’t. Anti-trust enforcement that continues to allow Amazon to profit to the max is the goal while eliminating the abuse of power that inevitably accompanies such wild success. Not saying it’s going to be easy
2
In Ann Arbor there are three independent bookstores, not counting the U. Mich. campus textbook stores or the local Barnes and Noble. All of them appear to be doing well.
Their clerks are generally knowledgeable and always friendly and helpful. Of course, they can't carry a million titles, but they can get almost any book in a couple of days. And it certainly helps that about 3/4 of the population holds bachelor's degrees or higher.
4
I make every effort to avoid spending money in the Amazon marketplace.
5
Amazon has become more and more unreliable.
The past couple of years Amazon has become flooded with cut-rate Asian sellers. Of course they are going to counterfeit--with so much manufacturing moved to Asia, it's easy for workers to run off a few extra of whatever they are contracted to make, or a less well made version, or they grab the damaged rejects, slip them out the back door and sell them themselves.
I don't want the very cheapest thing, I want the one that is going to last more than 10 minutes without breaking.
The reviews are no longer reliable. There are fake reviews promoting the product, and good products have fake negative reviews from competitors trying to drive buyers to their products instead. There are multiple instances of products with either 5 star reviews or 1 star reviews. You read the reviews and the 1 star reviews complain about an issue that the 5 star reviews say "mine doesn't do that." Fake alert!
The search function is no longer reliable. Looking for a specific American-made product, it won't come up on Amazon's search. Instead there are dozens of Asian knock-offs. Go to Google and search there, and it will bring up the Amazon page for the American-made product. Then you have to differentiate between Amazon's sketchy third-party sellers claiming to sell the real item, and the American manufacturer who is also selling on Amazon and is actually selling the real item.
I'm buying less and less on Amazon these days.
57
This is a matter of accountability. Just as Silk Road on the dark web was used to traffic in illegal goods, and was held accountable for it, so should Amazon. The "we are not responsible for the conduct of our users" as a defense is less and less tolerable. If Amazon values its existence, it will invest heavily in securing the supply chains of the products piped through its portal. Otherwise, Bezos might find those tickets to outer space he wants to sell are bought for him - going one way.
17
Amazon, like Twitter, Facebook, Google, have let its credibility be hijacked for the sake of the "algorithm." I suggest to Amazon management that they take this problem more seriously. If the marketplace of buyers doesn't believe Amazon is credible, then they will shop on line elsewhere. Delivery times don't matter if the goods are fake, and there are many places other than Amazon to shop for the same things they sell.
7
I have purchased from Amazon for many years and have never gotten anything that was not the exact, unadulterated product that I ordered, books included. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but if I ever suspect that I have gotten a fake or counterfeit I will immediately send it back and notify them as well as put it in a product review on their site. We consumers can fight this!
4
I currently work for a publisher. We experienced several large purchases with stolen credit cards. While we were able to catch most of the transactions, we have shipped probably 500 books or so to the credit card thieves. We found their store on Amazon, selling our books for outrageously low prices. We are on the hook for the fraudulent credit card transactions and the thieves move on to the next one and Amazon could care less.
78
@CTot
Wow, the ingenuity of scammers and thieves amazes me. While I am neither one of those, I imagine that if I had a stolen credit card to use, I would buy high-end stuff like electronics or fancy watches to re-sell.
Fencing stolen books on Amazon.
They need to think bigger.
Why is Amazon above the reach of a class action or civil lawsuit? When one knowingly enters into an agreement to further the sales of illegal counterfeit books which violates copyright laws, isn't that person or company by definition a civil co-conspirator? Willful ignorance should not be a defense, especially when profit is the motive.
15
@Conservative Democrat
Do you think any participant in a class action lawsuit would still be able to sell their books on Amazon?
@George W
If, as CTot comments, they don't get paid for the books sold on Amazon, they would be better off running their own website!
1
“There is strong competition amongst booksellers, from major retailers to independent booksellers,” the spokeswoman added.
False. I have been an independent bookseller for decades, and the level of cooperation among those in our trade is unparalleled. I would invite you to come to an ABA conference and see what teamwork, professional integrity, and commitment to customer service look like. We only have one competitor, and it is the Evil Empire.
31
I think you mistake the point. Amazon is saying there is competition in the marketplace -- i.e., consumers can buy from other book sellers.
2
It’s not just books. I ordered a popular product and it arrived from a Chinese address. Fake, fake, fake. And I had no recourse.,
6
Rules of competitive engagement ... Rule.
1
Review of this Article: One Star
I recently purchased a copy of this article on Amazon, but what I received was scarcely legible. The author, "Tolstoy," used no indentations and the print was smudged. The publisher, listed as "New Jork Times," should know better. Oh well, I guess I'll just go back to browsing on Amazon.
1
Amazon and Ebay have been getting away with murder these last decades because they are able to bribe Congress into allowing them zero liability for anything they do.
4
This seems like a Silk Road issue
1
I can attest to counterfeit products on Amazon. I wrote a review on a product that was a fake, and Amazon didn’t publish it - I reached out to their customer service asking why they wouldn’t post my review, then published it and gave me $5 credit. Every time I followed up asking what they would do about the fake product, they didn’t respond.
7
YeahBut, I thought the One True God blessed America because we embraced "His" biblical plan for (unfettered, predatory) Capitalism?
8
I guess I am confused. I thought counterfeit is something reproduced illegally with the "same" appearance (hence an imitation) but often in inferior quality. How come now even the dosages are altered in that counterfeit Antimicrobial Therapy book? Should we still call them counterfeits?
@YN
If data or portions of text are omitted, misinterpreted or incorrectly printed because the counterfeiter is casually copying the text, that’s where problems occur.
There is no standard, nobody is editing the copies, they might be copying a medical manual one day and a sewage handling system manual the next... so what if a paragraph goes missing or there are two page 57s...
When you don’t have to worry about the consequences of a mistake you can get real sloppy.
4
@YN
The "counterfeiting" is due to the theft of intellectual property.
2
I look to history to help me understand today and what to expect tomorrow. History shows us exactly what happens when respect for law and the truth disappears. Stealing intellectual property -- now practiced on an industrial scale -- is just one more example.
To plagiarize Walt Kelly's character Pogo from 1971: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
7
People, Overdrive and Libby are FREE from your public library. I've read/listened to 20 books so far this year and not paid a dime, other than my donation to the library system that I would of spent at Amazon. Wouldn't you rather support your Library than Amazon?
40
@Calleendeoliveira Your library is buying tons of stuff from Amazon, just like everyone else.
2
Not necessarily. The bulk of library purchases are from jobbers like Ingram.
3
Barnes & Noble’s Nook usually has the same e-books available for much the same price as Amazon. Thus far, I haven’t had any problems by now on And look usually you have the same e-books available much the same price as Amazon. From this bar, I haven’t had any problems by now on the Nook.
2
I remember the times in the 1990's when there used to be Corel Office before Microsoft started packing its Office products like Excel and Word within Windows and selling them at a discount. This pretty much killed Corel and other competitors. Now MS Office pretty much has a monopoly and the prices for MS Office keeps going up. Amazon might follow a similar path.
3
Word and Excel have never been packaged with windows, that has always been an extra CD to purchase, and from my recollection, it was more expensive than Corel or Lotus Suite. Corel failed because it was 1) awful, and 2) had poor market penetration. You could give someone a 3.5” disk with your Corel files but they probably couldn’t open them natively. Lotus 1-2-3 was a pretty decent spreadsheet for its time, and my business used Lotus until Office came along and eclipsed it.
@John
Corel Office is still available, I use it, purchased through Amazon.
People in the US often have the wrong impression that without Amazon, online sales would be worse.
When I lived in Belgium and the Netherlands, where Amazon isn’t dominant, the standard of delivery is next day free when ordered before midnight, 2 hours in cities for a fee. Without any subscriptions like Prime.
I find Amazon mediocre at best, with unreliable product reviews (fake, Vine, ...) and slow delivery (mostly 2 day Prime) even here in the city where they manage it themselves.
25
Second issue is that Amazon is selling more through random vendors and not from manufacturers. I went to buy a Nest thermostat, and their fulfillment is done by any number of random businesses. Didn't buy. What happened to being able to buy something FROM Amazon? (FWIW, I bought from Costco.com--better prices too)
26
@Nurse Keep in mind that while the "from Amazon" offer is probably direct from the manufacturer, this is not always the case. Amazon will engage anyone in a "vendor" relationship if they can get the product at a lower cost than the actual manufacturer is offering.
1
Books aren't the only counterfeited items sold on Amazon. I buy a lot of beauty and household products from Amazon. I knew that an expensive hair product was not the same quality, smell or texture of previous purchases. I had not bothered to read the reviews, because I was already happy with the product.
When I looked at the reviews for that exact same product I had ordered, many had the same complaint as I--that this was not the same product they'd bought for years.
Now I carefully read the reviews before ordering anything. Reviewers are great resources in that respect. I recently skipped the money-saving convenience of Amazon Prime and ordered a laundry product directly from the manufacturer because so many people were complaining about it not doing the job/being the same. It cost me $5.95 in shipping, but I got the real thing.
Amazon could start to see a decline in sales as people stop ordering products from them because they are counterfeit. I got a no-questions-asked full refund from Amazon for the counterfeit hair product (and was told don't bother to return it), but I suspect that was only because I spend thousands with them each year.
24
@RachelW This is smart, but the problem is that reviews are commingled, too, and unless a reviewer states which seller he or she purchased from, you have no way to know which seller to avoid. (You can go to the seller's review page, but most people don't actually realize there are two tiers of reviews on Amazon, so they only check the reviews on the product page.) For most products, there are a few, if not dozens, of offers from different sellers, one of which might be the direct manufacturer.
3
@RachelW I'm now buying straight from source and outside Amazon too. You know who you're dealing with, what you're getting. It's just safer. And it cuts out Amazon from holding legitimate suppliers/sources hostage, profiting off your information, etc. AMAZON ISN'T BENIGN. I won't shop at Whole Foods either. I will no longer touch anything Amazon does.
1
Bookstores are happy to order books for you if they aren't in-store. Libraries have all kinds of books for free! Amazon is not necessary (for books or anything else). Please don't adopt the false sentiment that it is. I let amazon go and I feel like I've escaped from something that's become sinister.
50
@Sook
Even where there are bookstores who are 'happy' to order books for you there is no way to browse among books that aren't there.
Libraries have some books that can be used free for a limited amount of time, but not all kinds - just some kinds. Amazon is a good source for everything from specialized historical references to popular series.
I've been a happy Amazon customer for 20 years. Even when I lived in places where book stores and libraries were available within a reasonable distance there were many valid reasons for shopping for some books from Amazon.
Now that I am living (by choice) in the middle of nowhere, and am physically unable (not by choice) to get out to shop Amazon is a godsend.
4
@Amoret I can't get out much, either, but that doesn't mean I'll shop at Amazon, which I also used to regard as a godsend. but now see as a menace. For new books, I can phone my local shop and have them order it for me, or I can wait for one of my frequent 15% or 20% off emailed coupons from B&N and then order from them. For used books, I turn to the still-independent marketplaces Biblio or Alibris. Check them out!
There are many, many better places to shop online for non-book items, too, including the websites of many superb small businesses. The old idea that Amazon always offers the lowest price on everything has not been true for years now. Look around; there is no need to support the greedy monster that Amazon has become.
5
@Amoret You can also order in-print books from IndieBound.org, run by a distributor to independent booksellers.
3
For the past 5 years I have lived in a rural area with few stores. I rely heavily on Amazon for a range of products: organic food, books, household goods, baby products, kids toys, some electronics. I have received a counterfeit once. The seller immediately refunded my purchase. Counterfeits are clearly a problem on the site but in my experience they aren’t. I have to read reviews: notice poor grammar, poorly written english, reviews that complain about quality, and book sellers’ customer rating; so far this has been adequate. Amazon requesting sellers to participate in “policing” counterfeits in a community watch effort seems reasonable because an algorithm can’t solve this problem yet. Perhaps they should educate consumers about recognizing fakes (like eBay does)? Counterfeits are not unique to Amazon ask music, fashion and film industries execs. It is simply the newest street corner.
11
@Change Happens
"Amazon requesting sellers to participate in “policing” counterfeits in a community watch effort seems reasonable because an algorithm can’t solve this problem yet."
That doesn't seems reasonable to me. That seems absurd. A store that sells trash and asks its' suppliers and customers to police their shelves, because they "can't"? That's nuts.
It's their store, they should know what they're selling. If they don't, can't, or won't, that's their problem, nobody else's.
5
@Change Happens: All of that time you spend scrutinizing product listings and reviews to ferret out fraud is unpaid labor performed by you for Amazon. Amazon could perform greater quality control on the sellers and products sold through their platform. They don’t, and have instead outsourced that task to their own customers, i.e.: you. How do you like performing free labor for the richest man in the world?
3
Solving this problem is going to be tough, but I can think of a first step: introduce a clearly visible medallion on product pages whose books Amazon has sourced through entities it has verified do not sell counterfeit items.
On the other side of the ledger, publishers are going to have to start printing covers that use the same anti-counterfeiting technologies governments use to print currency. Then publicize their efforts so buyers look for these telltale signs on the books they order.
I’m sure a couple of expensive high-profile lawsuits by major publishers could get Amazon to start paying attention to this miserable oversight.
14
How weird. I had no idea this was going on. Still, though, I think the biggest problem with Amazon in relation to books is people publishing books they themselves have written that have no business seeing the light of day. Many of them are so poorly written that I'm pretty sure they were composed via text message while the "author" was driving and then sent off to Amazon without so much as a single moment spent on checking for typos, grammatical errors and sentence structure, much less little things like plot and character development.
2
Seriously? Poorly written books are in no way comparable to counterfeits. Just don't buy them, period. Problem solved. Btw, there are plenty of awful books coming out of reputable publishing houses as well.
4
I don't know if the immunity many social media sites enjoy applies to commercial sites like amazon, but they should. Lost the immunity, you will see accountability. With accountability the monopolies will collapse.
1
Want to counterfeit a book? It’s pretty easy.
Go buy one, scan it as a PDF and set it up as a book with printing on both sides of each page. Put your name in place of the real author. Or, even easier, give the PDF to Amazon, or any decent print shop, and they will do the heavy lifting for you and you get a digital copy of the book.
Other than best sellers (and even some of them), most softcover books sold on Amazon are digitally printed, often one-off copies printed on demand. This is prime real estate for piracy.
1
A few years back I ordered the Windows 7 Pro OEM version of Microsoft's packaged software product from a third-party seller on Amazon. At first it seemed to install and run fine. A few months later, following some downtime, I started up the system and it reported "counterfeit license".
I reported the situation to Amazon but by then the seller had disappeared and nothing could be done. I ordered another copy of the same product which following installation has been running fine ever since.
The scary part was a close comparison of the two products, one counterfeit and the other genuine. The outer package, the inside inserts, and the discs themselves were all identical to a casual examination. Only with a magnifier could one detect subtle texture differences in some of the printing. Someone went to great effort to make a passable counterfeit. In the end, only the license code string gave it away - and even that took a couple months for Microsoft to reject.
7
I hope the statement, "The bigger they are the harder they fall" applies to Amazon. I understand books are expensive but those of us who spend locally help hedge against this monopoly.
28
I once bought a movie dvd on either amazon or ebay. when it arrived it clearly wasn't original as advertized. i was refunded and the seller asked me not to make waves.
1
Me, too. I didn’t comply.,
1
This section does not make sense: "Phil Ollila, chief content officer of Ingram Content Group, acknowledged that he had not told No Starch, the copyright owner, that its rights were violated. 'That seems like the polite thing to do, doesn’t it?' he said."
5
Watch prices on everything they sell go through the roof
Great example of the ‘we’re gonna put our competitors out of business’ attitude of American capitalism
Signed
American businessman
12
They mostly sell “Fast” and “Low prices”. What could go wrong?
4
Send back any book that you think is counterfeit. If there are enough returns, Amazon will have pay more attention.
Spelling the author’s name wrong increases the ability to hide books from authors!
9
Cheap knock-offs of almost everything has been a problem in Asia for decades. Amazon has just allowed it to come to the American household.
Recently bought what I thought was the paperback of a beloved classic. What arrived was a flimsy piece of trash, bizarrely copied-and-pasted from the internet. Amazon refunded my money; I didn't even have to return the book to them (they didn't want this garbage back, clearly). I wrote a description of what I'd purchased in the product reviews, to warn off other buyers. In all, I was crystal clear that what they were selling was a piece of possibly illegal trash. Just went to check - the book is still there for purchase.
This isn't just books, of course. Knock-off beauty products, toys - just dig deeper into the reviews and you see the legit responses, with angry costumers. This must not be a problem worth dealing with for them... at least not yet?
16
Authors who felt exploited by the Big Five publishers flocked to Amazon only to be fleeced in other ways. The key takeaway is that Amazon gets its financial cut no matter who 'publishes' the book.
Amazon's early monopoly in the ebook trade set the tone--and there was no incentive to change. Books are downloaded, pirated and sold with only the characters' names and the titles changed. Books are cobbled together by ghostwriters using paragraphs and passages from published books and sold to unsuspecting buyers. "Buy' boxes are linked to non-royalty resellers. Amazon makes money off the original and the pirated copies no matter the seller. It's a win-win for them.
Weeks after it was discovered that Cristiane Serruya had plagiarized multiple writers, her books were still on sale at Amazon. (They were finally pulled.)
Friends of mine who were caught in Serruya's plagiarizing net were powerless to do anything beyond complaining if their publishers failed to take action. Most writers, myself included, don't have the money to sue in court.
Pirating, plagiarizing, and counterfeit copies? Amazon doesn't care. They have an endless stable of unaffiliated authors. While there are a few toothless national organizations like Romance Writers of America who wave their fist and complain, policy rarely changes. (The Authors Guild negotiated a fast-track complaint procedure. I guess so Amazon can ignore authors faster? Who knows.) In the end, it's always the authors who suffer.
22
You should see all of the counterfeit Weight Watchers cookbooks - many are machine translations with absurd instructions.
4
One remedy (but not a solution):
Whenever counterfeits are discovered, Amazon should have to proactively refund the customer AND send them a legit copy at no cost—with the legit title being bought directly from the publisher.
284
@Douglas Alden
Better still, let's make it a class action with substantial damages.
Amazon has no business selling counterfeit books.
8
The scary thing is that the solution may end up being less marketplace vendors and more Amazon sales. I am not sure the is a happy outcome.
3
The premise of this article is false. The problem of counterfeiting currently has zero - zilch, nada - to do with the fact that Amazon has a monopoly. Counterfeiting books is a form of criminalization that comes with the digital age. If anything, Amazon's dominance would make preventive measures easier to enforce if it chose to do so because all the counterfeits are exposed on one platform. The fact that Amazon chooses *not* to enforce against counterfeiters is separate news.
15
@Alex - I disagree. The premise of this article seems to be that when the book seller market is dominated by a company that identifies as a tech company, rather than a book reputable book merchant, we can expect more counterfeiting.
It is outwardly apparent that Amazon does not measure itself by valid transactions. It measures all transactions equally.
27
Amazon is defrauding customer every day. Where are the lawsuits? Do we have so few consumer protection laws on the US that a company can blatantly and knowing commit large amounts of fraud with no repercussions?
I'd be happy to initiate a lawsuit myself, but I've never been an Amazon customer. I only shop locally.
8
I'm quite appreciative of being able to pay a couple of bucks for nicely formatted public domain works through Kindle. To the extent there are fakes in the more lucrative ebook mass markets, it seems that in the old days somebody setting up a store to sell stolen goods was called a "fence", and could be arrested and / or liable in civil courts for the tort of "conversion".
On the overall justice issue, it's worth pointing out that copyright protection has become ludicrously long worldwide, and the USA is particularly aggressive in trying to extend it - far beyond the social cost/benefit calculus it is supposed to serve. An interesting recent development is that the public domain in jurisdictions like Australia provides for local Gutenberg and university ebook services to offer free, legal downloads of major works that will remain illegal in the USA for decades to come. The Obama administration was set to drag Aus / NZ into the ridiculously extended US regime under the TPP, and those sources were gearing up to comply, but Trump kiboshed it. If you want the complete Virginia Woolf, its free from Aussie sites (though only a couple of bucks for a better edition on Amazon.)
2
That last line is more concerning than anything else in this article. We feel like we don't have anywhere to go but Amazon.
7
@Michelle Yes, I'm sure Amazon enjoys that false sentiment. I got along fine before Amazon and I get along fine now - i'm going Amazon-free (most things are available elsewhere).
6
@Sook I'm a retailer. There is no marketplace that comes close to Amazon.
Tt's sort of comical to be scrolling through this article about "counterfeits" and find the screen cap of the complaint about Murder on the Orient Express. The Murder on the Orient Express version being complained about is from CreateSpace. That is AMAZON's own self-publishing platform, for which there is pretty much no supervision. So someone in this case has simply scanned the pages of a copy of Murder and has uploaded them to Amazon which is printing and selling the book itself for that seller at no cost who only has to sit back and wait for some clueless person to order and collect the money. The problem here is that many of these types of books are probably technically legal by the fact of using public domain material. Amazon has, for example, tons of "self published" versions of Jane Austen or whoever, not against copyright law. Not to defend them, but probably the easiest way to deal with this phenomenon is to do what Amazon does, wait for an individual complaint from a rights holder rather than try to police all products themselves. And it's not illegal to throw together terribly sourced written material and repackage it as a "book." If you are going to have a global online marketplace in which people upload products without supervision, this predatory behavior is going to happen. I would be happy to see Amazon crash and burn but it's up to consumers to be a little smarter. There are all kinds of tip offs to help you avoid buying one of these poor quality rip offs.
7
We have given over integrity to the mendacity of FAANG companies, for the sake of trifling conveniences and to save a couple of bucks.
AMZN makes its real profits from Amazon Web Services, and thus your local schools and governments feed this snake when they host sites on AWS.
Those profits help AMZN justify their retail corruption to Wall Street.
We need to consider aspects of our consumerism more closely.
7
I grew up on Long Island, and our town had one of the perpetual flea markets. It was the place to go to purchase 'Ataro' games or 'Lovi's' jeans, and perhaps some real merchandise that had 'fallen off the truck'.
Amazon has become that flea market, just operated by the Bezos family rather than the Genovese family, and the government ignores the issue in the same manner that Suffolk County PD overlooked the obvious.
149
@ErinsDad
And let's not forget "Nolex" watches and "Memex" blank cassette tapes (yes, I am that old).
The difference between a "brick and mortar" flea market, if you will, and online flea markets, is that you can see what you are getting or not getting before buying-- or you can have a good laugh ("Memex" tapes?) and walk on by.
15
I find all this absolutely incredible. I have purchased books, tools, food, you name it, from Amazon for several years, and have yet to be pranked on any of it. They are prompt, what they send me is what was advertised, and I can get many items on Amazon that are not available anywhere else around here, including WalMart.
For those of us who live in the country (outback) Amazon has been a very helpful godsend, in this modern age.
I simply do not understand these complaints.
6
Clearly, Amazon sees the problem of counterfeiting part of the cost of doing business. Where are the class action lawsuits? There aren't any. Why? Amazon doesn't care. We see reports of their immense profits every quarter. Like Facebook, Google, and other tech giants, that's all that matters to them. Integrity is not part of their balance sheet (and if it is, it's only in name only, a public relations statement or a commercial).
11
This is a fine article but it only scratches the surface. Clearly, medical and technical manuals represent huge domains for counterfeiting. Others not mentioned here are textbooks and journal articles, of which I am an author. I can't imagine any intelligent person paying the inflated amounts advertised online for extracts from or "guides" to my publications. But it must take only one or two gullible purchasers to make some of these overpriced fakes worthwhile to the perpetrators. Amazon is facilitating criminal activity and needs to be regulated and broken up, like any other monstrous commercial entity.
119
I worked in the medical/health science publishing industry for years and there was always the issue of counterfeits of important clinical books from India & elsewhere. Distributors and stores would partner with us in working to discover such frauds. Another bothersome issue I have is with the Reader Reviews that are clearly posted by Marketing Folks or who knows who... same goes on sites like Good Reads. Reviews clearly not written by interested readers.
And yes - sadly on ABE, as well as Amazon, outrageous pricing that has no basis in reality. Algorithms or something? There is a laundry list of complaints & obvious issues that should be policed & caught by a responsible seller/distributor.
As an avid reader & collector these are issues I see on almost a daily basis. Amazon wanted to rule the world - so they need to accept the responsibility
39
@Jimi
FYI, Abe Books is owned by amazon. They acquired it in 2008.
1
I purchased scientific textbook from Amazon, and then I realized that the code that came with it for online access didn’t work. I contacted the publisher, and was told that Amazon sold me a knockoff version. That was news to me, especially I paid the full price.
90
@Mark M Did Amazon give you a refund or any other satisfaction to make you whole? Or did it just come back with a nice plaque that said "Caveat Empty"?
3
This is exactly why Elizabeth Warren is calling for the break-up of Amazon.
The “self-governing” ethos and “crowd-wisdom” blithely assumed inherent in the design of the Amazon, FB, etc. never anticipated the dialectical relationship with criminals , cheaters, and liars such open platforms would create. They can’t be blamed for this unintended consequence—only for hiding their heads in the sand, hoping all of this would go away, and being utterly complacent because of their own size and power.
We would not tolerate CVS for selling counterfeit drugs—how is this any different?
As for pressure on Amazon, we ought to protest as consumers and suspend all purchases for a week.
The legitimate publishers—a Random House eg. ,ought to
announce a coming suspension of business with Amazon , unless Amazon actually starts policing its inventory. It would be a boon to brick and mortar booksellers, and books would still be available to readers . Publishers’ sales would probably suffer from being disrupted temporarily—but this is a hill worth dying on.
In the end, though, neither the legitimate publishers’ nor Amazon’s executive leadership has the wisdom, courage, vision or permission from their owners to put their profits at risk.
This leaves the government, laws and regulations as our only defense against cyber-pirates. It is why Elizabeth Warren created the Consumer Protection Bureau and why we need protection from too-big-to -regulate corporations.
285
@John C
CVS sold me compromised Losartan this year. They were allowed to self-police. How is that any different?
14
@Kate Baptista There was a recall of ten lots of Losartan, ordered by the FDA in 2018. Then, in March a consumer-level recall for similar cause. Clearly, like you, they did not tolerate contaminated pharmaceuticals being passed off.
My point being that in the cited comparatives, CVS and the FDA acted in defence of safe and authentic drug supplies.
I'd say that makes it very different from Amazon self-policing without any external regulatory constraint.
25
@John C
It’s ironic you would reference CVS since it is embroiled in its own problems, not entirely dissimilar to what so many describe here in comments. I learned yesterday that the US average cost of a medication I need to treat pulmonary fibrosis is about $15 per month; CVS/Caremark, which is moving to a required mail-order delivery and which will cost more jobs, I fear, charges $245 for the same.
How is this relevant to your discussion? As you write in your last paragraph, we need our government to do what we vote them in to do and pay them to do - govern equitably, with the needs of the majority of people in mind.
I realize that regulations eat into profits.
Here’s another truth: sometimes lack of regulations destroys lives.
Many in Congress have become as profit driven as the corporations who pay lobbyists to buy them. Ot at least their votes. How many times have we heard that Senators and Reps struggle to survive on 175K annually for what is it, 100 days in Washington? They should try surviving on what most Americans actually earn.
No matter what our political bent, we all live with the consequences of corporate and Congressional misdeeds, and as you and this article point out, it’s killing some of us.
14
Ever tried ordering something from Amazon Warehouse? Described as cosmetic imperfections, those products have often been heavily used with a lot of wear and tear, and are sometimes even downright defective. They just keep shipping the item around until someone, for some reason, keeps it.
26
1) “This report cites a handful of complaints, but even a handful is too many and we will keep working until it’s zero.”
2) The company said it strictly prohibited counterfeit products and last year denied accounts to more than one million suspected “bad actors.”
One million is equivalent to "a handful"... ?!?
90
Everything about Amazon's domination is bad and I have been one of the billions who helped create it - an early adopter/shopper and addict of it's ease. I've watched how it's impacted towns and cities - each dying store by store. I've watched my checking account constantly show up with unwanted monthly fees for various Amazon services - how do I accidentally sign up for Kindle Unlimited so frequently?
This weekend I sat in the back yard listening to a neighbor yell out 'ALEXA' repeatedly to play specific songs -- but I guess Alexa couldn't hear what the rest of us could - or maybe she was busy taking in more important information. My neighbor finally gave up to the relief of us all sitting in our our backyards - reading various Amazon products and shaking our heads at the silliness of those who yell "Alexa." Who are we fooling? We are all willing to give them control - and we will soon be dodging their robots on the sidewalk.
It does anger me though- if I had had a say, I'd -ve said 'no' to phones that listen to my conversations, 'smart' houses, cars that spy on me, cameras on every building amassing my data from my face, etc. I would have said no - no to the robots that will drive next to me, and to the robots that give me the wrong change, and who make all the decisions for 'us'.
Instead those inclined to non-socializing- addicted to AI and computing got to choose for us. The changes happen so fast, we are dumbfounded -struck dumb. AI y'all. Welcome to SmartWorld.
77
@PercyintheBoat
I dread the day Amazon delivery drones are buzzing everywhere outdoors. Constant obnoxious noise. Now a new product announced, "Amazon Surveillance" too. Yet more noise on the way. You won't be able to hear your neighbor yelling "Alexa!" because of all the drone noise.
11
@PercyintheBoat
This was so well written, someone might yet print it and sell it on Amazon for 2.99!
8
@The Poet McTeagle
When those Amazon drones start flying, I foresee skeet shooting becoming the fastest growing sport in America.
2
I just want to echo the comment that this is far from being a "new" development. I bought books through Amazon years ago that were poorly printed and formatted, rendering them virtually unreadable.
But, hey, as long as I can get two-day free shipping with Amazon Prime, who cares, right?
9
This is where the government should step in. The public are being cheated and the company could careless so long as they get their buck. Track down the source of the counterfeit , prosecute and then place a hefty fine on the company for turning a blind eye. Problem solved.
54
I ordered a book from Amazon as a gift for Fathers Day. It did not arrive. I “chatted” with customer service who guaranteed delivery the next day. It never arrived.
I went on chat again and it said, we’ll send a refund. They did and I bought the book at Barnes and Noble.
55
Seriously, people are surprised by this? How naive!
13
@Jeanine People are mindless. No wonder we can all be replaced by robots.
2
On a related note, Amazon also owns ABE Books (ABEbooks.com).
Rather than dealing in counterfeits, ABE suffers from fake sellers, or rather re-sellers. Sellers in name only that don't hold any inventory, and who, if the buyer is so gullible as to purchase from them (at wildly inflated prices), purchase a legitimate copy from another seller, and have to book drop shipped, and reap the profit. In my estimation there are at least a half dozen of these sock-puppets on ABE. They always have the most expensive copies of books, and seem to have copies of almost everything one could search for. This has been a known issue for at least 8–10 years, and Amazon has done nothing to stop it. This is a bit ironic since Mr. Bezos began Amazon as a used book seller. One would imagine the organization would seek to create and foster a more legitimate marketplace. But alas.
As regards counterfeits, of course there's also a burgeoning industry in on-demand reprints of books no longer in print, or in the public domain. There are dozens of these sellers as well.
Caveat Emptor.
53
@MJB Books in the public domain are actually legal candidates for such on-demand reprints.
@EB Yes, I understand, I work in publishing. To more complete my point, because the march of technology has been to take the hand of man out of most manufacturing processes, the ability to quickly and cheaply scan an entire book by automated means, and then to print on demand has flooded the marketplace with debased material. This begins with public domain works, and ends with the low-cost pirating of copyrighted work. Because computer.
8
I just don’t buy from Amazon any more. There’s no way to know if you’re going to get a fake or not. It isn’t just books; it’s everything on Amazon. They’re promoting products from legitimate publishers/manufacturers, and fulfilling orders for those products with cheap knockoffs.
176
@Kira
Truer words were never spoken.
1
I am a self-published author who sells my books through Amazon, and have also found listings for my book for absurdly large amounts of money. I haven't done anything about it, because (like many self-published authors), I've never sold many copies in the first place.
I found it really bizarre that anyone would try to sell a book, which is obviously being sold by the author for $28.95, in a listing on the same page, for fifty times the original amount.
I just thought, "Good luck to them."
21
Counterfeiting has been going on for years. I'm looking right now at an edition of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
one of two counterfeit books I've bought through Amazon: it
lacks a masthead page and any info whatsoever about a press.
This is to say, not just computer manuals and health manuals,
which actually make money, are being counterfeited; the entire
western tradition is open to counterfeiting. And counterfeited books can end up the very first entry on the first page of Amazon searches. Amazon just posts whatever counterfeiters give them
to post. I had no idea that Amazon was so complicitous, if that is strong enough a word, in all of this: thank you for a fine article.
152
The phrase “poorly printed and hard to read” describes an experience I had with Amazon about a year ago. In response to a request for a particular title, a friend ordered it sent to me. What arrived was not a book in the standard sense of the word; it was an ungainly volume printed in exceedingly small typesize on pages so wide I needed a ruler to follow the text. Still, it was the book I wanted so I started to read it. A headache set in before I reached the end of the first page, so I stopped reading. Two days later a second attempt produced the same result, at which point I gave up and composed a letter of complaint to Amazon. The letter went unanswered. Buyers beware.
65
I, as it seems naively, thought there were certain guarantees of quality control and authenticity if I bought from Amazon. They certainly have the means to exercise such control and since we have made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the US, it would seem he owes us such guarantees in return,
191
@Elizabeth
I've stopped buying from Amazon. My electric toothbrush didn't operate and my two coffee carafes arrived badly dented. Both came from 3rd party partners of Amazon and both were returned for a full refund. I'm done with them.
After hating Wal-Mart for years due to their low pay I now buy from them and so far have had great outcomes on all my deliveries.
3
@Mike I have still have the same reluctance to buy from Wal-Mart, though!
8
@Elizabeth
The prices we pay for merchandise should go partly to ensure that kind of quality control.
That's what real bookstores do.
Bezos seems to think that it should all go into his pocket, without, apparently, even the most minimal guarantees of quality.
7
There’s a simple way I deal with buying books online. It is called alibris. Or any number of self selling publishers. There’s a really fine one in Maine. I’ve been counterfeited in my trade and it is painful. One question is when Amazon crumbles, what will we do with all the huge boxes they created to make such a flawed empire. Their antithesis certainly has a legacy of that sort, not the easily converted structure for a free thinking society.
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This is horrendous but not at all surprising. Another reason to patronize your local library when feasible.
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@Mary Crawley Local libraries are going digital. I talked to the librarian at our local community college, regarding how few books were there, he said the students don't take out books anymore; they have been digitized.
Thing with digitized books is that they can be recalled, and a limit for how many times the books are read can be put on the digital copy. It used to be that libraries could resell discarded books, but not when they are digitized.
The idea that it is possible to reach out over the internet into your home and snatch back a book you paid for is frightening - and it happens.
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@Mary Crawley, very true, and with library-linked digital services such as Overdrive, Libby, and Hoopla, a great alternative to feeding the Amazon beast.
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This is a much bigger problem than stated. While you focus on books, the same could be said for many other items that Amazon sells. Reading the comments for a costly name brand shampoo, buyers say this is not what I buy in the beauty salon or at the drugstore and doesn't work and isn't worth the money. All consumer protection is up for grabs in this business model. How what about vitamins that Amazon sells and its ventures into prescription drugs? These can actively harm an individual directly.
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I was stunned to find out that the reviewers were right about a hair product—the large size bought on Amazon is nothing like the sample from Sephora (which doesn’t stock it). Counterfeit? I have no idea, but it’s going back.
The only consumers can have any control is to complain and return.
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@DianaID
That's why I will always use my corner Walgreen's where they know me and I know them. I will not use any mail order Rx service, no matter how much BC/BS want me to.
It always pays to know and be known to people and places where you spend your money -- in person.
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@DianaID
Most of us can buy from local stores instead. It can be difficult when one is budget conscious but it beats the heck out of dealing with a faceless, soulless mega-corp.
I patronize one of the few local pharmacies left in our city and have discontinued buying anything from Amazon unless it can't be found locally or elsewhere online. Surprisingly, the price is often cheaper buying from other sources.
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The same thing that happens when any domination is complete. It begins to abuse its power, and we are seeing it in Amazon's neglect to police what it sells. Only when someone is killed or badly injured because of medical books that are counterfeit, and sues the living daylights out of Amazon, would Amazon perhaps try to put the $ and effort into policing itself. in the meantime, the last time I tried to order something from Amazon they made it too difficult to figure out how to avoid signing up for Amazon Prime - ie, the "club" that will allow them to charge you monthly whether you buy from them or not. I don't buy from them enough to warrant paying them monthly for the "privilege." So I signed up for the free trial, will cancel it as soon as my order comes, and shop elsewhere in the future. There's not much I can do to revolt against the $$ who just want to take more from me for no reason other than they want it, but I can refuse to cooperate. Reading about Amazon's neglect in book publishing makes me happier I've made the decision I've made.
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Completely share your sentiments, but just want to note that Amazon Prime is actually billed yearly, rather than monthly.
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@Brookhawk I personally began boycotting Amazon shortly before their purchase of Whole Foods, which of course confirmed my fear that Amazon is out to take over the world of retail altogether. (I mean, our FOOD?) My gentle suggestions to friends and family to do the same usually elicit a comment that they know they should, but. ... Younger folks seem 100 percent on the Amazon bandwagon — signing up for Prime and starting with Amazon anytime they need pretty much anything. I find this terrifying.
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A family member worked for Amazon and told me in 6 years there ware houses will have all robots no workers. Why then are we giving Jeff Besos all these billions in tax breaks to make him richer if this is his secret plan to end human workers in his business. Wake up America stop enabling Amazon, Walmart from doing this to our economy and to us. Shop at mom and pop stores if there are any left.
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The saddest day; Driving by Toys R Us and knowing Christmas will come and go without walking the aisles and seeing the excitement of kids and parents as they shop. Together. As a Society interacting, sharing a Holiday.....When Toys R Us closed.....our shared world died a little more.
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@D.j.j.k. It's not such a secret plan. That's what many, many businesses are doing.
When people don't have money because they don't have decent jobs or get decent pay, then who are their customers?
Since these are global organizations they just sell to other countries. Try finding large businesses who don't have global operations, and you start to see how the problem is growing.
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... and Uber and Luft ...
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