Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook

https://wandering.shop/@youseeatortoise/111782434593735690

by Kye • 3 years ago

342 137 3 years ago

wandering.shop

wscourge• 3 years ago

Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience that we haven't yet managed to do.

It indeed is, I had the same experience. Good idea to asking here, you might just find some

ufocia2• 3 years ago

It is that, most likely by design. The harder to access a relatively expensive human, the better the bottom line.

mikequinlan• 3 years ago

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/retail/2022/09/14/how-t...

malermeister• 3 years ago

I'm gonna guess their language police bot took issue with the word "bastard".

wccrawford• 3 years ago

That, combined with that it appears to be aimed at "depressed, disabled, and broke folks" (their words, from that link) and I can imagine some people took offense and reported it.

jayceedenton• 3 years ago

That can't be it. Their are hundreds of books on Amazon with far worse words in the title.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

Would you be interested in the paperback version of "Looks Like It's Fuck This Shit O'Clock"?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1092412743/

flir• 3 years ago

There must be a whitelist process though: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=bastard&i=stripbooks

las_balas_tres• 3 years ago

What about the book. "How to take a shit in the woods" https://www.amazon.com/How-Shit-Woods-3rd-Environmentally/dp...

cafard• 3 years ago

Amazon would love to sell me the novel Bastard out of Carolina in paperback or electronic format, or a DVD of the movie made from the novel.

riedel2• 3 years ago

Just checked, interestingly it is still available for on demand order via other channels. Wonder if they still print it and only delist on their own frontend [0]. Maybe it is a bit of compensation if they profit from the Streisand effect.

Regarding Amazon I find it funny that they actually engage quite a few people e.g. for tech support of end users. I think they know where to optimize..

[0] https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/suggestartikel/A1067374317

javawizard• 3 years ago

interestingly it is still available for on demand order via other channels

Where, if you don't mind my asking? This would make an excellent birthday gift for a good friend and I'd prefer to get her the print edition, but a quick search is failing to turn up anywhere that offers an actual hardcopy besides Amazon.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 3 years ago

I'm trying to remember what service we considered, when an organization that wrote a book self-published (I was on the committee to write the book).

We ended up actually commissioning normal printing, and selling the book, ourselves (it was quite successful, if I say so, myself. We made our money back in about a month), but we did consider a service that allowed you to sell print-on-demand. They ran the store, and the printer. You could also move eBooks through them.

This was many years ago, and memory fails me.

riedel2• 3 years ago

This was just a random German online book seller that are connected to a major distribution system. I don't know how it is elsewhere in the world, we in Germany have just a fe major distributors. I remember when publishing my PhD thesis I could chose if I wanted a ISBN and allow global distribution, when self publishing on Amazon (was much cheaper than any other options that required my to buy a batch). Actually small publishers have been living a lot of PhD theses in Germany, but nowadays electronic publication is allowed and not everyone has boxes of their manuscript in the basement as it used to be.

andirk3• 3 years ago

I understand the obsession with being on Amazon, but can we please normalize selling elsewhere? The internet is a vast expanse. Why do we think Amazon is the end all be all? I do not understand this.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

For consumers, it's easy: Amazon offers a consistent effortless experience. They already have all your payment and shipping data, so no need to create accounts and passwords at some random site with unknown security standards, you know what to expect in terms of shipping vs whatever that random shop is using, no need to worry if the shop will be around in a year or two to honor warranties, no worry about bullshit surrounding returns, warranty claims or refunds.

ufocia2• 3 years ago

How does Amazon handle warranties, especially in a year or two? Pray tell.

teeray• 3 years ago

The shipping is huge. I’m so much more inclined to purchase something that’s FBA rather than wait for some seller to see the notification that a sale was made, drive back from the lake house because it’s the weekend, pack up the item on Monday sometime, then finally drive it to the post office on Tuesday.

dageshi3• 3 years ago

All the customers are there and the company has perhaps spent more time than any other figuring out how to sell books to people. They're better at it than everyone else.

Ma8ee• 3 years ago

Not all the customers. I actively avoid Amazon since quite a few years back. There are literally dozens of us!

repelsteeltje• 3 years ago

So not much authors can do.

As a consumer, I invest time and money to try buy elsewhere (and boycott Amazon) when I can, but it's not always easy. Also, I'm aware that these kind of Don Quixote boycots seldomly have an impact macro economically. Nevertheless, I keep trying...

zilti• 3 years ago

Maybe in the USA, but over here, many book stores are a lot better at selling books (both on- and offline) than Amazon

andirk3• 3 years ago

My friend bought a book that was literal gibberish in its thousands of pages. Yes he got a refund. The question still stands, especially among an open source community, WHY is Amazon the defacto? I argue let's stop that

lwhi• 3 years ago

I don't think the solution is quite as simple as choosing to normalise selling elsewhere.

imgabe2• 3 years ago

You would have to normalize buying elsewhere for it to make any difference.

carlosjobim• 3 years ago

When sellers invest time and effort into making it comfortable to buy, there is no problem at all getting customers to pay on your own website, outside of Amazon or other platforms like Booking.com or what have you.

However, most sellers have a hostile attitude towards their own customers, whether the seller is a business or individual. They won't make a decent webpage, they won't make an acceptable and smooth buying experience, and they won't match price or give a better price than the platforms. So, naturally customers will go to who they trust.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

If there was another store that had all books amazon had, with a Kindle like experience on all possible platforms and e-readers, I might consider that.

The only other store that I know of is Rakuten and that’s by far a worse experience.

Hnrobert42• 3 years ago

For books, I always go to bookshop.org first. They pass some profit along to a local bookstore of your choice.

andy99• 3 years ago

I don't use amazon (although I cheat a bit because my wife sometimes does). But for books we use indigo.ca (in Canada) which has the same selection and is importantly not Amazon. Is there another national US online bookseller?

For other stuff, I just go to the hardware store. The only real amazon thing I depend on is a kind of micro-fibre wipes I use for my glasses.

It's actually mostly happened organically since amazon got so bad, although the last few times I used it I abandoned my cart trying to navigate the dark pattern of paying without buying prime or getting tricked into shipping fees.

wojciii2• 3 years ago

I'm doing something similar. Amazon is Russian propaganda stupid these days and I don't hate myself enough to use it much.

vcg3rd• 3 years ago

Is there another national US online bookseller?

Barnes and Noble. Their Nook isn't as good, but it's an alternative. I also will buy books [1] direct from publishers, and there are still more narrowly focused sites like History Book Club and Christian Book Distributers.

[1] I dislike using qualifiers (physical books, postal mail) which turn centuries-old words into phrases. If I mean e, I say/write e, otherwise I mean what the words always meant.

wut42• 3 years ago

Is there any good alternatives to Amazon print-on-demand ?

perihelions• 3 years ago

Also available here,

https://nightbeatseu.ca/works/the-sad-bastard-cookbook/

https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook

- "We made it legal with Creative Commons (4.0 attribution non-commercial), but if you get a thrill from breaking the law, you can pretend it’s not."

coolandsmartrr• 3 years ago

I love the copyright description. Is this book full of humor like this?

leetrout• 3 years ago

Yes. They note things like being reliably informed salt makes (most) things better.

borlanco• 3 years ago

I would say yes. They try hard to make cooks laugh.

This is one of their recipes:

  APOCALYPSE RAMEN

  This is basically like regular ramen soup but with three critical differences: 

  - It is intensely chaotic, which is to say that you can pretty much toss anything into it and say you did it on purpose.
  - It's slightly healthier, if your depression has lifted enough that you want to eat something other than delicious, delicious chemicals.
  - It involves a mason jar, so you can feel like you're riding out the end of days in true hipster style.

  Core Ingredients & Supplies: 

  - Mason jar or other heatproof receptacle.
  - Boiling water.
  - The only requirement here is rice noodles. Why? Because they cook fast.

  Preparation: 

  - Put all ingredients in the jar.
  - Boil some water.
  - Pour into jar to cover ingredients.
  - Shake it up a bit (not right away, otherwise you'll burn your hands and get more depressed).
  - Let it sit for a few minutes.
  - Enjoy???

  Variations: 

  - Remember those takeout packets of hot sauce and soy sauce? This is a good time to use them.
  - Frozen or fresh vegetables. Wilted is absolutely fine here. International readers may call them "wilty" vegetables. Reader, you are now bilingual.
  - Any kind of spices. We particularly suggest garlic or ginger powder, but seriously, anything will work.
  - If you have tofu or some other protein to use, go for it.

cdrini• 3 years ago

My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector. Amazon has been flooded with low quality AI generated books in the past ~year, and has been removing a lot of it. My guess would be they're still tweaking their algorithms as folks generating books change their tactics. Hopefully a human will respond soon!

jruohonen2• 3 years ago

That would be my guess too. A few months back they announced a ML model to clean up the reviews, but I'd argue that it is a lost battle; there is so much human-made and now AI-made garbage already. A solution might be a full deletion and then a real identity verification for reviewers.

wil421• 3 years ago

Sometimes the merchant will switch a product with reviews with a different product. So it looks like it has 1,000 reviews but in reality most reviews are for something else.

raffraffraff• 3 years ago

Aren't people en-masse realising that AI, for all its impressive bling, is a stupid blunt instrument? If you've used it for any amount of time you'll know this. Sure, it's a great time-saver, and if you use it wisely it can remove a lot of tedium. But if you're a developer, one thing you'll know is that it cannot replace developers. You still need to structure your whole project yourself, figure out what the data schema needs to look like, and direct the AI tool to do small sections of the work. And you should be ready to sanity check and debug anything it spits out. Similarly with AI image stuff, if you have a bunch of old black & white photos that were taken on a shitty camera in the 1940s, you can get it to upscale, repair, clean and colourize. But if any living person knows any of the subjects in the photographs, be ready for them to laugh their heads off (or get extremely angry) that grandpappy's eyes are not grandpappy's eyes, that they have lost all family resemblance and look more like expertly stuck-on googly eye stickers. Also the colour palettes are wrong for the time, their teeth get magically straightened, their fob-watch chain gets turned into a rope etc. Some of these un-guided AI effects are as bad as their non-AI counterparts, like Affinity Photo's "magic inpainting" that's supposed to let you easily paint out unwanted items in a photo. They look like magic when removing a seagull from a cloudless sky, but they'll make an absolute hames out of anything remotely complex. For example, removing a person from a busy street. Instead of inventing some plausible background to replace them with, it'll just auto-clone their surroundings into the vacuum so you end up with very obviously duplicated features (door handles, street signs etc). This is something that you would never do as a photography professional. So can it save you a bunch of time? Sometimes. Can you rely on it to work without a human in the loop? You're havin' a laugh!

Something that all AI tools need to build in is the ability to override their learned data and to curb their enthusiasm for inventing completely wrong detail that was never there. While AI has gotten impressive, I wouldn't trust it to do anything remotely important without a competent human driving it.

The biggest problem with AI is that companies that adopt it think that they can fire a bunch of staff and let AI tools run amok.

wegfawefgawefg5• 3 years ago

It's blunt if youre using it for dumb shit in the same way that a hammer is a blunt instrument if used to break peoples stuff. If you are using it for highly domain specific knowledge its very good, whether that's protien folding, teaching you some arcane programming language macro, etc.

refulgentis• 3 years ago

To be fair the guy is speculating (n.b. suggest breaking that first chunk up, it's about a page and half in a single paragraph)

rolph2• 3 years ago

what is being called AI is nothing special its just another script,just like cloud is just storage on another computer.

there was this mentalist act,[kreskin] as many are, the act was a mind reading, clarivoyant number, backed by the same thing "AI" does, i.e. statistical analysis, and ordering, of information gained while evesdropping.

tetris11• 3 years ago

Hopefully a human will respond soon

I wonder how quick the transition of HITL (Human in the loop) to HOOTL will be.

michaelt• 3 years ago

There will always be a 'request manual review' button.

It'll go to a call centre in the third world where workers are expected to perform a review every 5 seconds.

jasode• 3 years ago

My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector.

Maybe not. If you go by the screenshot of the email from Amazon in the Mastodon link, the book was removed for violating "Community Guidelines" instead of the actual content of the book itself.

This is the "Community Guidelines" url in that email: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

So taking Amazon's reason at face value, it means Amazon thinks the author (or author's friends) manipulated the "community" ... i.e. such as creating fake reviews, 5 stars ratings, etc.

An example of tripping the Amazon "community guidelines" algorithm would be something like a suspicious # of reviews coming from different Amazon customers but they're all from the same ip address.

As an example of "inadvertently" setting off Amazon's community guidelines detector... if you're going to ask friends & family to leave positive reviews for your book, make sure they don't do it while they're all there at your house for Thanksgiving dinner.

In the email, the author offered to take down his reviews in hopes that Amazon would reverse its decision.

Someone1234• 3 years ago

Seems like a nice way of killing a competitor's products.

mike_d2• 3 years ago

So taking Amazon's reason at face value

Having dealt directly with managing abuse and handling account terminations, the reason you are told is never the actual reason.

As annoying as it is for the 1% of false positives to not get a straight answer, the net effect is the 99% of bad actors don't know what they did to get booted - which means they can't adapt as easily.

DennisP• 3 years ago

Here is Amazon's policy on AI-generated content:

We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390

I personally know someone who published about a dozen AI-generated Kindle books before being notified of this policy, and none of it has been removed.

ghaff5• 3 years ago

That policy still seems clear as mud if you're using, say, generative AI within Photoshop to help design components of a cover design. I'm also not sure how that's really different from using CC or public domain imagery as part of a design.

"AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards."

My reading of that is that, if you use AI to create any image even in part, that's AI generated.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

WTF is the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted. Seems like a very murky distinction.

atlantic• 3 years ago

As we're beginning to discover in our generation, censorship is largely down to the individual censor, and if you're looking for some kind of underlying rationale, you're wasting your time. Censors too are sad bastards, and the one ray of dark sunshine in their little lives is to make others miserable.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 3 years ago

I have a feeling that this will be resolved soon.

Frontpage on HN tends to bring results.

I wish the authors luck, and would love to hear the resolution.

For myself, I haven't brought any books on Amazon for a long time, but that's mostly because I dislike the Kindle app, so I get my books through the Apple iBooks store.

lawgimenez2• 3 years ago

I forgot why I had a pdf of your cookbook, have you at some point gave this out for free?

felurx2• 3 years ago

It is and afaik always has been available for free

lawgimenez2• 3 years ago

Oh got it. Thanks!

philistine• 3 years ago

For years I made book versions of the articles on my website. When came time to make the third volume, Amazon threw a massive fit that my books were reusing content!

I ended up abandoning their bookmaking service for Lulu. My books are still for sale on Amazon, but I’m not letting them do anything with the printing.

hiyer• 3 years ago

It's still free on itch.io

FumblingBear• 3 years ago

It also made front page on HN a while back, maybe 6 months ago?

zillanovikov3• 3 years ago

Zilla here (one of the Sad Bastard Cookbook authors). Thanks so much for your support ... I'm lowkey dropping "front page of Hacker News" when I talk to Amazon Service reps now, in the vague hope they have any power to actually help me. I think I've reached at least one real person, but in the days of AI voice chat, who can tell?

Many of you asked why we use Amazon as the exclusive printer/distributor of the print edition. Variations of this happened to basically every self-pub author I've met, so why didn't I use another platform?

1) Reach. As Ma8ee pointed out, there's literally dozens of people buying books online but not on Amazon. If I want readers to find it, I need to be on Amazon. Bonus, one of the most important controlling factors in new people finding your book is whether the Amazon promo algorithim suggests the book to them, so any sale off Amazon doesn't contribute to building an avalanche. The game's rigged, but it's the only game in town.

2) Money/quality. Last time I checked (few years back, things might have changed), Draft2Digital print books were bad quality. Ingram print books are decent quality but their calculation for printing fees and royalties means they usually don't pay out at nearly the same rate. I've not compared directly for the Cookbook, but for Instant Classic, it's the difference between making a couple dollars or a couple cents. We did it for Instant Classic as a service for people who despise Amazon, but the royalties from the Cookbook are a substantial factor in "eating" and "making rent" for one of the Cookbook team, so there's a limit to how much I want to give away the print edition of the Cookbook. Especially if "giving it away" involves the reader paying Ingram, just not us. If anyone knows a print-on-demand distributor who pays out enough in royalties for authors to make money, please respond to this.

3) Distribution. We're small fry self-pub, without a big publishing house behind us. I've looked around for places which will take us on self-pub books and distribute them, and the options are pretty limited. I'm convinced we'd sell in brick-and-mortar stores, but that's typically not an option for self-pub unless you approach the owner of an independent bookshop on an individual basis. (We approached a couple proper distributors who accept query letters from non-traditionally published books, but they focused on specific genres and we weren't the right fit.) Basically, if you're not traditionally published, you're looking at Amazon, Ingram, or Draft2Digital to print and distribute your books. If anyone knows of other printer/distributors which take self-pub books, PLEASE tell me.

ETA: people are informing me that Ingram can make money, and that Lulu exists. I am investigating.

wishfish• 3 years ago

I've had good luck with Lulu. My experience was short-runs. I sometimes like to make custom notebooks for myself and friends. But the quality was good. Lulu will print spiral fold flat editions. Might come in handy for a cookbook.

I've also had good luck with Blurb. They do high quality photobooks. Which isn't what you're selling, but I'm mentioning them because they will offer your book for sale, print-on-demand, via their site. And wouldn't be surprised if they have a way of selling via Amazon. They wouldn't be a bad choice if you wanted to sell a $50+ coffee table edition of your cookbook. Or a bit lower for a paperback edition.

zillanovikov3• 3 years ago

Oh thank you, I'll look into that!

ilamont• 3 years ago

Indie publisher here. Sorry to hear about this. Among the numerous frustrations that publishers and sellers report when dealing with Amazon, automated lockouts are near the top of the list. Inability to get a clear explanation or knowledgeable human support are close behind.

I always tell other publishers that Amazon's seller tech is like a rickety roller coaster with lots of kludged together components - built to go fast, but with lots of loose bits that rattle and sometimes cause the system to fail. Technology glitches, bad UI design, poor communication, and complex policy requirements lead to a huge support burden. Even if you can get a good Amazon support agent, they are not always able to diagnose certain problems, let alone provide a fix.

The parts of the company facing small publishers and third-party sellers is extremely siloed, which makes things even worse for sellers trying to get through complex issues touching multiple services. Reporting something like "I can't get Amazon Advertising to connect with my KDP account" can lead to runarounds that require multiple tickets or are never solved.

Regarding distribution: I don't use a distributor owing to the lead time required and the huge commissions involved, but a few I know work with IPG (https://www.ipgbook.com/). If you have a track record of sales, that can open the door to distribution and potentially help get through the Amazon problems you are experiencing as they have direct contacts with back-end Amazon staff.

zillanovikov3• 3 years ago

Thank you for the advice! I'm sad to hear it hits indie publishers as well as self-pub, but I guess that's the way.

Aloha• 3 years ago

Had I known bout this book before it got removed, I would have bought a copy.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience

Material for their next book!

ArtemZ• 3 years ago

Ok how do I order the book now? Why there is no website to buy it directly?

juunpp• 3 years ago

They should re-publish is as The Sad Motherfucker's Cookbook. There are a lot of sad motherfuckers out there who could use some skill.

OJFord• 3 years ago

Amazon in all its wisdom has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook. They won't tell us why.

I mean.. I assume it's right there in the title?

Not that there isn't other stuff available with such words, but there's not much, and the bar/automation might be higher for self-published or other 'indie' stuff? (If anyone's interested in jars of 300 F's to give or not, by the way...)

ao982• 3 years ago

If your first thought was “what is The Sad Bastard Cookbook”, here’s an except (and yes, totally worth fighting for :)

“Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you’ve worked a 16-hour day, when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. It’s vegetarian/vegan. It’s a community-built project. And the e-book is free. It’s hard to survive late capitalism and we want to help.”

dotancohen4• 3 years ago

Interesting correlation, by the time I got to "when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why" I thought to myself the cookbook had better be vegetarian. Is there a known correlation between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?

ao982• 3 years ago

That’s a good question (and I don’t know the answer). As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical. And canned/frozen aren’t great options.

The opposite holds true for many veggies because they are seasonal - for big portions of the year, canned or frozen are the best you can get. Beans/lentils, dried or canned, etc.

JumpCrisscross2• 3 years ago

Is there a known correlation between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?

Apparently yes [1][2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36045075/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63910-y

devwastaken• 3 years ago

Use the optimum tactic other sellers do: relabel.

wseqyrku• 3 years ago

Has the US downgraded to a third world shit hole that people/companies tend to be concerned with this kind of stuff? Disclaimer: I live in such a place and this is normal.

Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook

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