On Amazon, some book summaries get mistaken for original
Firm pulls shortened versions of popular reads including Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up
Summaries of popular books have long been a staple in the publishing business. Now they are often hard to tell apart from the real thing.
Authors and publishers say they are concerned about a recent surge in summaries available on Amazon, some of which have covers that copy or mimic the original’s art and use the author’s name. Some consumers are mistakenly buying those summaries instead of the original works, they say, hurting their sales.
Summaries of top-selling selfhelp and business titles appear at or near the top of recent searches for the books on Amazon, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. In some cases, the covers of the summary and the original book were very similar—aside from a “summary” label at the top.
“Quite a few readers reach out to me scratching their heads, asking for refunds, etc. after buying such editions with confusingly similar fonts” and cover art, said Timothy Ferriss, author of such best-selling titles as “The 4-Hour Body” and “The 4-Hour Workweek,” in an email.
After the Journal contacted Amazon.com Inc. last week, the company said it would remove the works from its store that violated its rules and subsequently pulled a number of summary titles highlighted by the Journal.
Amazon, much like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., has come under pressure to do a better job policing inappropriate activity on its platform. The company has struggled to entirely weed out makers of counterfeit products, as well as sellers who are finding new tricks to outsmart Amazon’s automated product-ranking system. Its sponsored-item advertisements have come under criticism for looking similar to regular listings and appearing in unexpected spots such as people’s baby registries. The book summaries, typically self- published using Amazon’s tools, are the latest challenge.
Publishers say the current offering of summaries—which retail for a fraction of the original’s price—differ from past ones such as CliffsNotes, which often had generic covers that looked nothing like the original, and ranked lower in search results. The new breed of summary publishers have used Amazon’s powerful advertising platform to their advantage, buying up keywords that ensure their products appear above those of nonpaying sellers—albeit with a “sponsored” tag above the title. Sometimes, the summaries even carry a “best-seller” label.
A search for “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” by Angela Duckworth, on Tuesday listed the book summary, which was a sponsored result, ahead of the entry for the actual book. In one online review, someone claims to have inadvertently purchased the summary instead of the book, saying, “I did not read the title as closely as I should have.”
“It’s frustrating,” said Ryan Holiday, author of “The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Tri- umph,” referring to several summaries of his book for sale on Amazon. “It’s hard to get a reader to the point where they are ready to buy your book, and then somebody else swoops in.” Mr. Holiday said that it would “be hard to argue that these knockoffs don’t end up costing authors some sales.”
The impact can be significant, with one publisher estimating that tens of thousands of summary print copies have been sold of best-selling books. The person said the industry had no way of measuring the sale of e-book summaries.
Amazon said in a securities filing last week that it may not be able to prevent sellers “from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner, violating the proprietary rights of others, or otherwise violating our policies.” An Amazon spokesman said the company required that book summaries “be sufficiently differentiated to avoid customer confusion.”
“If we find that a title doesn’t meet these requirements, we remove it promptly,” he said.
Among the titles removed by Amazon last week after the Journal inquired were several summaries of Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” The book, originally published in 2014, has gotten a lift recently, thanks to a related Netflix show that made its debut earlier this year. Both summaries that were subsequently removed appeared as sponsored results.
Attempts to find contact information for several booksummary publishers including Millionaire Mindset Publishing, which sells summaries of books including Ms. Kondo’s “Tidying Up” and Mr. Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Body,” were unsuccessful.
“As the publisher for Marie Kondo, we want to ensure that her copyrights, and those of all our authors, are protected, and we appreciate the support for this from our sales partners as well,” said Aaron Wehner, publisher of Ten Speed Press, which is owned by Penguin Random House.
Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, an advocacy group with approximately 10,000 members, said in an email that Amazon is “generally very good about taking down pirated and trade- mark-infringing books. But they have not been able to filter them all out in the first instance.”
Peter Brown, a New York intellectual-property lawyer, said that summaries such as CliffsNotes that are intended “for educational purposes and provide commentary” are generally permitted under the copyright concept of fair use. Copying the text at length isn’t generally permitted, he said, because it appropriates the work of the author.
Summaries that use the same covers or mimic the covers of the original books may constitute unfair competition under state and federal laws, Mr. Brown added. Distinctive covers have value, he said, and those rights holders are protected. “It is really about causing confusion in the marketplace,” said Mr. Brown.
The cover of Ms. Duckworth’s “Grit”—originally published in hardcover in 2016 by Scribner, an imprint of CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster publishing arm—depicts a group of large and small gray arrows pointing to the left against a white background.
On a cover for one of the book’s summaries, the gray arrows are going up and down.
“It has the appearance of being written and sanctioned by the author, and it’s not,” said literary agent Richard Pine, who represents Ms. Duckworth.
A spokesman for CompanionReads Summary, a Philadelphia-based book-summary publisher whose works include the summary of “Grit,” said most of its titles have been taken down by Amazon because they violated its publishing guidelines. CompanionReads now plans to exit from the book-summary business, he said. He described the summaries as offering analysis, commentary and opinion. Asked why CompanionReads chose to imitate the original’s cover for its summary of “Grit,” the spokesman said it wanted to create “a similar vibe.”