Pirated books thrive on Amazon

https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-amazon-authors-say-web-giant-ignores-fraud/

87 78 3 years ago

A long time ago, Karsten Self did a stock demand curve analysis of software piracy: http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Rants/piracy.html

Turns out that software piracy keeps prices lower. As consumers, we are regularly told that price of goods or services is absolutely all that matters. Therefore, why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?

teddyh2• 3 years ago

why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?

Because pirated books are almost always of markedly lower quality, whereas pirated software is (almost always) functionally equivalent to (or better than) the non-pirated software.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

Except when pirated software includes malware or excludes assets to save space.

cstross4• 3 years ago

why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?

Speaking as an author: because I write for a living, and if I can't earn a living at this I'll have to find some other job, which will cause me to stop writing. Piracy is directly rivalrous for the author's revenue-earning product. (Libraries are less so insofar as Public Lending Right and royalties on library editions cause some money to go to the authors.)

Remember, authors are not film studios or rock groups. We don't have merchandising opportunities, we don't perform live for a ticket fee, and we're mostly very small-scale sole trader businesses. Our revenue comes 100% from sales of our books, unlike bands (who make peanuts from streaming but are paid to tour) or film studios (lots of spin-off merchandise).

(Median income for full time novelists working in the UK, per the ALCS in 2022, was around £7000 a year. A tiny handful make millions, a large number are hobbyists doing it in their spare time for pin money, a small number of us earn a middle class income -- not management level, not even programmer or web developer level. It doesn't take much to tip us from "just getting by" to "giving up, have to go stack shelves in a supermarket" territory.)

cjbgkagh3• 3 years ago

It quasi surprises how pro-piracy hacker news is, probably in large part due to need to minimize their own guilt from their own piracy. Maybe there is a socialist bent with the belief that if there was no money novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it. It seems that only SaaS products are acceptable but then hackernews also hates subscriptions...

carapace2• 3 years ago

I was just thinking about this today, I hope you don't mind me bouncing it off of you?

The computers & robots seem poised to make most human labor obsolete. (I'm only really good at programming computers and I feel like my career prospects just evaporated. Craigslist job section seems to agree with that assessment as well.)

To me it seems like the obvious response is to sort of declare ourselves the winners (Humanity: 1, Nature: 0) and get on with Star Trek. (In other words, institute something like UBI so people don't starve and/or riot, fix up our relationship with the ecology so civilization doesn't crash, ...and then I don't care what we do.)

What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work? I don't mean in a greed sense ("If it is money it is good.") but more in the philosophical or practical senses.

As an example of what I mean, the young fellow who writes/draws "Kill Six Billion Demons" ( https://killsixbilliondemons.com/ ) basically went from art school directly to a fan-supported, uh, career on one story, releasing pages as he drew them. (He then also publishes hardcopies, and I think he sells schwag too.)

zamnos3• 3 years ago

Limited, but not zero, as the existence of a Laundry table top game states. I would totally buy a "Bob Howard" minifig or some sort of Laundry diorama from you!

jhbadger• 3 years ago

Remember, authors are not film studios or rock groups. We don't have merchandising opportunities, we don't perform live for a ticket fee

They used to! Charles Dickens was very popular in the US in the 19th century. But because of the lack of international copyright laws, it was completely legal for American publishers to print copies of his books without giving him a dime (because they were only covered by British copyright). So what did he do? He did a couple of tours of the US where he sold tickets to shows where he would read from his books and answer questions from the audience.

guidoism5• 3 years ago

Question for you in particular since you are an author who I read and enjoy (and pay): Would you continue writing novels if you got UBI of equivalent size and weren't allowed to charge for your books?

mistrial9• 3 years ago

you are describing the point of view of the market manager, whose wish is to make profit and keep the (relative) peace. Brand protection is a different concern, a concern of many participants, not the manager.

Brand integrity is a way for consumers to find quality or other attributes reliably. Brand building is a real way to build wealth for those seeking to do business in the market. These positions are fragile and rely on some amount of enforcement by the market managers.

This point of view is similar to many professions who deal with large volumes of the population, and when some of them become ill, suffer, have losses or disappointment, the response is "the market is healthy. To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. What business is it of mine if people buy fake products?"

dahart3• 3 years ago

why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?

As the article demonstrates, when the quality is extremely low, the consumers suffer. Also, in this case, the price of the pirated books is the same as the price of the authentic books, so this is not a good demonstration of Karsten’s armchair economic theory of software piracy. In this case, the consumer loses and the real authors & publishers lose, while these fraudulent middle-men, the fake publishers and Amazon, pocket the difference in price. This is bad for the consumer and bad for the economy, in addition to being illegal.

Your question implicitly is asking why we even have Copyright Law and/or the Berne Convention, which is something that has a long a rich history. I don’t feel like we need to justify the existence of copy rights. There’s a rich debate on how long copyright should last and what the limits should be, but very few people suggesting we should just get rid of it completely and allow the pirates to flourish.

candiodari2• 3 years ago

How does this work? There's plenty of books this is tested on: out of copyright works.

And there's indeed a great variety of quality available on those books. Great and very bad. Consumers don't suffer because of this, at least I don't, in fact I've recently discovered a bunch of out-of-print out-of-copyright mathematical works that are so much better.

Also I got pirated Anthony Horowitz books (I have the originals, but 30 year old book and all. Plus it's in the attic), that are much better than the originals at this point.

The thing is when it comes to actually making texts and culture available, libraries and librarians (and archive.org), and indeed piracy are generally the highest available quality. Why? Because there's no alternative. Once 2 or 3 years pass, copyright owners forget 99% of their stuff and just refuse to make it available. Expected profit is just too low (this goes 10x against publishers, who often take books out of print against the wishes of authors). So libraries are the only quality available, and I much prefer that over the black hole copyright owners present ...

cjbgkagh3• 3 years ago

I used to make software for the masses but it was pirated to the point that the business wasn't viable. I had to switch to a very expensive small niche. While pirating is still rampant it's a niche where I can effectively sue so I can make sure at least my biggest customers keep paying which is enough to keep the business afloat. A lot of goods simply will not be produced at any price if piracy keeps producers out of the market.

zirgs3• 3 years ago

How do you explain open source software then? Why is Linux still being developed?

ThrowawayR2• 3 years ago

I have always suspected that the variety of pro-piracy posters on HN probably have no qualms about violating the GPL or other FOSS licenses either. It would be logically consistent at least.

pierat• 3 years ago

It's funny you say that, but it was Linux that really got me to double down on actual piracy.

I tried to get a Netflix subscription. For a long while, nope. Wouldn't work.

Even now, Paramount streaming specifically excludes Linux. Theyll gladly take your money, though. Oh, and it works for chrome and android, of which the second is Linux.

The people who actually try to buy and pay distributors/creators get screwed time and again. I further refuse to take part in getting screwed again.

Or take the Microsoft Zune. Anyone who bought music there ended up buying void after they arbitrarily shut the auth servers down. Cause, uhh, Microsoft couldn't afford a few auth servers? And their sharing added in illegal DRM, especially if I was playing CC tracks that expressly forbid that. (And of course, the irony that MS is part of the business software alliance, with heavy draconian hands of licenses and copyright.... All the while pirating and breaking GPL with copilot. And you want US to respect you? QED: fuck off, MS)

There's the whole DVD debacle with deCSS.

Whereas with Linux and the FLOSS ecosystem, I do recognize that fellow creators are being ethical, and giving for the cost of "follow my license if you use code". And there's no spyware, DRM, or other harmful stuff. Sure, there's bad actors.... But those bad actors are usually companies like Microsoft who pilfer all our code for their benefit and profit (Copilot).

Tit for tat is the best game theory solution so far. And given how many times I've been screwed over by media companies arbitrarily revoking first-sale doctrine because it was really a rental... That means I'll "pierat" my media. I've paid enough. And I will help others free of charge do the same.

I guess to look at my views, it really is anti-commercial and pro-FLOSS. And having copyright rules different for the rest of us versus the big media also colors my judgement.

(And my last 3 projects were aGPL3, precisely to keep companies from _aaS my software without contributing back.)

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

No, there's a lot of people here angry at GitHub for making a code-writing tool that occasionally launders GPL code.

To actually violate the GPL requires at least some effort towards locking the system down. If you just torrent some Linux ISOs, they either contain source, links to source, or that weird written offer thing that GPLv2 wanted. You'd have to actually remove those in order to violate GPL. Pirates would not be happy with you for doing this.

It's also important to note that there's a bit of a difference between different kinds of piracy, and they have different mentalities. You have the FTP topsite scene users, then P2P users, then people trying to resell copyrighted material for money. The first two are more aligned with either "we don't like copyright, period" or "we like downloading free shit", which makes them either aligned with or neutral to the FOSS community. The latter group does not care, they just want a quick way to make a buck. If they couldn't resell other people's books on Amazon, they'd probably be committing some other kind of cybercrime.

bediger40002• 3 years ago

I hope you do not include me in the pro-piracy category! I buy books and I like to hold them in my hands before buying. I've even bought books to reward, in some small way, authors that seem like good people.

Unfortunately, as in most things, the context of my question seems to have gotten ignored:

As consumers, we are regularly told that price of goods or services is absolutely all that matters.

Modern anti-trust law pivots on this principle. Modern attitudes toward labor and hourly rates are based on this principle.

Why are we asked to abandon this only in select cases, cases where we as consumers, end up carrying the bulk of the burden?

bryanrasmussen• 3 years ago

software piracy has two effects - it keeps prices lower and it helps spread the purchase of legal licenses of software.

It helps spread the legal license of software because by using illegal software you learn how to use it and when you get to a job you ask your employer for a version of the software you are familiar with, or because others need to buy software to interop with your illegal software.

There is not really any reason to suppose that pirated books help the sale of real books in a similar manner.

turnsout• 3 years ago

I bought a technical book from Amazon recently, and it looks extremely legit. However, when I got to Chapter 4, only the sidebars and titles were printed—not the main text. The pirates had some kind of typesetting error, and a whole chapter was borked. So not only do I feel duped that I gave the scammers money, I had to rebuy the book (more carefully this time).

tracker1• 3 years ago

I'm not sure most people would care if not for the quality issues. Big surprise, someone willing to rip off someone else's work is also going to cut corners to make a product so inferior as to be practically useless.

Until, or unless it starts actually and materially affecting Amazon's bottom line, I doubt they'll do anything significant about anything. They're the 800lb gorilla and will survive for decades just on entropy at this point.

endisneigh• 3 years ago

I was told information wants to be free, though? These authors need to get with the program /s.

In all seriousness, Amazon needs to stop being so complacent and hurry up and remove them.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Snarky but people's opinions generally do tend towards a dichotomy of deserving and undeserving victims, if you will, of piracy.

This is a general tendency people believe. The categorical imperative is not something that people live by.

It's okay to pirate from some people but not others. Perhaps because software people are "overpaid" and artists are "underpaid".

Interesting stuff, definitely. For my part, the Kindle makes things too convenient for me to pirate intentionally (once I bought a book only to find that it was almost certainly pirated - massive typos in the metadata and it was removed soon after).

timonoko2• 3 years ago

"Fight Club" is a grand example of pirating. The author got the book printed and movie made only because early version was so popular in Usenet.

-- Wikipedia does not tell the truth, but it never does.

mulmen• 3 years ago

I don't see that claim in the wiki but maybe I need to look closer.

timonoko2• 3 years ago

Or maybe simple firefighter Palahniuk did not even know what internet was. Thus it was indeed a "surprise" when his book was suddenly accepted.

Anyways. The original short story was published in some shitty literary magazine, wherefrom the evil pirate copied it to Usenet.

shrikant• 3 years ago

IMHO, Tron 2 was also only made because of heavy piracy of the original -- the gap between the two seems baffling otherwise.

sasaf5• 3 years ago

After several 80$ blatant photocopies, I stopped buying books from amazon. My local bookshop can order almost any book directly from the publisher, and I can refuse the purchase if it looks pirated.

AStellersSeaCow• 3 years ago

I worked in a part of Amazon that had a lot of ability to help detect and flag this sort of fraud. I had to fight hard to get even a proof of concept project greenlit.

There was exteme organizational disinterest - partly for a bad but predictable reason (we made a lot of money off these fraudsters) and partly for a reason so bad it still makes me cringe (money recovered from identified fraudsters went into the balance sheet of a different SVP's org, so our org viewed it as a waste of time).

I made the case that the longer we let the problem fester, the less people would trust Amazon to buy anything. Leadership didn't really care but got sick of me constantly making noise about this and eventually signed off. That said, at my project's peak I had four engineers and one data scientist. Compare to consumer fraud and vendor fraud, both of which negatively impact Amazon directly, which were fought by entire VP-level orgs of hundreds of people.

In the end we put together a system that detected blatant fraud easily and in worrying volume, but as soon as I left - which meant there wasn't anyone in leadership sponsoring it - it was quietly mothballed.

cosmodisk• 3 years ago

This alone should be an article on a major newspaper...

adhesive_wombat2• 3 years ago

Well if nothing else, I'm glad that my intuition is not too far off-base. I had assumed that with a fairly minimal amount of analysis of the data that Amazon definitely has or can get, fraud would stand out plainly, therefore failure to address is organisational, not technical.

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

Excellent example of workers knowing what’s best yet having less than zero control over it (at best setting precedence that it was a waste of time to combat unjust hierarchical decision making through hard work and advocacy without role based power). A bigger change is needed without waiting on those who achieve power to change their minds for a min

tyingq• 3 years ago

That sounds a lot like the current state of credit card fraud detection in the US. Merchants, the end company you're buying from, end up holding the bag for fraud. At the other end, the payment networks for Visa and Mastercard have all the visibility, history and context, but none of the liability.

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

Cory Doctorow has talked about this problem in what is possibly the cheekiest choice of medium I've ever seen: https://www.amazon.com/Why-None-Books-Available-Audible/dp/B...

everyone• 3 years ago

"Amazon is getting flooded with counterfeit versions of books" - Hmm thats bad.

"the issue is especially widespread for textbooks" - Oh ok, carry on then.

cperciva• 3 years ago

This isn't limited to fake copies of books which are legitimately listed on Amazon, either. About a decade ago I found my doctoral thesis available for sale on Amazon -- with someone else listed as the author.

YeBanKo• 3 years ago

Many of Amazon practices I find questionable, and I think unsustainable in a long term. Unfortunately legal frameworks does not put enough pressure on them to change. Vote with your money, I was able reduce my amazon purchases to 2-4 a quarter and use other online/offline retailers.

JoyfulTurkey• 3 years ago

I have had this happen with a few O’Reilly books purchased from Amazon. The paper was ridiculously thin and I could see the page edges from photocopying all throughout the book. Amazon did accept the returns. I don’t like what Amazon has turned into, it used to be such a great place to shop online. Now it’s mostly garbage.

ZoomZoomZoom• 3 years ago

Pirated you say? How about these blatantly fraudulent reprints of the original Programming in Lua book by Roberto Ierusalimschy (other books by these "authors" are highly likely also fraudulent):

- Claudia Alves, Alexander Aronowitz: Lua Programming: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Learn Lua Step by Step

- Kathleen Peterson: Lua Programming: Syntax, Concepts, and Examples

Pirated books thrive on Amazon

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