Amazon is being inundated with counterfeit versions of books, angering both customers and authors who say the site is doing little to combat literary scammers.
Counterfeits sold by third parties through Amazon range from e-books to hardcovers and fiction to non-fiction, but the problem is especially widespread in the case of textbooks, whose sky-high prices attract fraudsters, according to sources. of the publishing industry.
“The harm to authors is very real,” Matthew Hefti, a novelist and lawyer who found counterfeit versions of his own book on Amazon, told The Post. “It’s such a widespread problem.”
The end result is that readers are stuck with unreadable books that leak ink or fall apart, while authors and publishers lose revenue to publishing pirates.
Amazon, however, keeps a cut of third-party sales, regardless of whether the books they ship are real or fake, giving the company no incentive to crack down on counterfeits, people complain. of the publishing industry. They say the site that is generally known for its fast service is excessively slow in responding to their counterfeit concerns.
‘Unreadable Pages’
Martin Kleppmann, a computer science researcher and academic, has seen one-star Amazon reviews of his data modeling textbook for years, with angry customers complaining of garbled text, missing pages, and other quality issues. He blames counterfeiters, who he says have been selling pirated versions.
“This book is very poorly printed,” says an angry review of Kleppmann’s book. “The ink goes everywhere after 10 minutes of reading.”
“Pages print overlapping,” says another review. “About 20 unreadable pages.”
A third reviewer complains that he had to order Kleppmann’s book from Amazon three times before receiving a usable copy. The two forgeries had transparent paper and other defects.
“I see a lot of negative reviews complaining about print quality,” Kleppmann told The Post, adding that his publisher has asked Amazon to fix the problem, but the company has done nothing.
Amazon spokeswoman Julia Lee said in a statement to The Post: “We prioritize customer and author trust and continually monitor and have measures in place to prevent prohibited products from being listed.”
Amazon spent more than $900 million worldwide and employed more than 12,000 people to protect customers from counterfeiting, fraud and other forms of abuse, Lee said.
But Kleppmann isn’t the only author who has run into problems with fakes on Amazon. Google deep learning researcher Francois Chollet complained about counterfeiters in a popular Twitter thread in early July, accusing Amazon of “doing nothing” to crack down on widespread counterfeit versions of its textbook. .
“Anyone who has purchased my book on Amazon in the past few months has not purchased a genuine copy, but rather a lower-quality counterfeit copy printed by various fraudulent sellers,” Chollet wrote. “We have notified [Amazon] several times, nothing happened. Fraudulent sellers have been in business for years.”
Even The Post’s own columnist, Miranda Devine, saw fake versions of her book on Hunter Biden, “Laptop from Hell,” released on Amazon last year.
After Devine’s editors notified Amazon of the problem, the fakes remained on the site for days, he said.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment about the specific examples of counterfeits in this story.
‘Endless game of whack a mole’
Amazon typically requires authors and publishers to scan the site for counterfeit versions of their own books, then fight through layers of bureaucracy to weed out counterfeits, according to intellectual property attorney Katie Sunstrom.
“The burden is on the seller for Amazon to stop infringers and counterfeiters from selling in their system,” Sunstrom told The Post. “There is no push at Amazon to take care of that.”
Kleppmann’s publisher, O’Reilly Media, told The Post that he routinely files complaints with Amazon about fraudulent sellers, but that the company is often slow to address his concerns.
“It’s a never-ending game of hitting a mole where accounts just resurface days or weeks later,” O’Reilly’s vice president of content strategy Rachel Roumeliotis told The Post, adding that Amazon will respond to “individual symptoms uncovered by users.” editors”. but it does nothing to stop the “systemic flow” of counterfeits.
“Amazon spends a lot of time trying to combat the perception that their marketplace perpetuates fraud because they know there’s a problem, but their platform and policies are designed in ways that make it easy,” Roumeliotis said.
Fakes that spread unchecked can put perpetrators’ careers at risk, according to Hefti.
Beyond cutting into the profits authors make from books they’ve already published, counterfeit sales don’t count toward official sales figures. Lower sales figures, in turn, will make it more difficult for authors to sign future book deals, Hefti said.
“The model is very exploitative for writers,” he said. “I don’t even know if there is any solution, at least not without Amazon having to spend a ton of money and lose a lot of existing profits.”