San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Amazon’s book control blamed for counterfeits
SPERRYVILLE, Va. — “The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy” is a medical handbook that recommends the right amount of the right drug for treating ailments from bacterial pneumonia to infected wounds. Lives depend on it.
It is not the sort of book a doctor should puzzle over, wondering, “Is that a ‘1’ or a ‘7’ in the recommended dosage?” But that is exactly the possibility that has haunted the guide’s publisher, Antimicrobial Therapy, for the past two years as it confronted a flood of counterfeits — many of which were poorly printed and hard to read — in Amazon’s vast bookstore.
“This threatens a bunch of patients — and our whole business,” said Scott Kelly, the publisher’s vice president.
Kelly’s problems arise directly from Amazon’s domination of the book business. The company
sells substantially more than half the books in the United States, including new and used physical volumes as well as digital and audio formats. Amazon is also a platform for thirdparty sellers, a publisher, a printer, a selfpublisher, a review hub, a textbook supplier and a distributor that now runs its own chain of brickandmortar stores.
But Amazon takes a handsoff approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way.
That has resulted in a kind of lawlessness. Publishers, writers and groups such as the Authors Guild said counterfeiting of books on Amazon had surged. The company has been reactive rather than proactive in dealing with the issue, they said, often taking action only when a buyer complains. Many times, they added, there is nowhere to appeal.
The scope of counterfeiting across Amazon goes far beyond books. Ecommerce has taken counterfeit goods from flea markets to the mainstream, and Amazon is by far the ecommerce heavyweight. But books offer a way to see the depths of the issue.
“Being a tech monopoly means you don’t have to care about quality,” said Bill Pollock, a San Francisco publisher who has dealt with fake versions of his firm’s computer books on Amazon.
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 1 million suspected “bad actors.”
What happens after a tech giant dominates an industry is increasingly a question as lawmakers and regulators begin taking a harder look at technology companies, asking when dominance shades into a monopoly. This month, lawmakers in the House said they were scrutinizing the tech giants’ possible anticompetitive behavior. And the Federal Trade Commission is specifically examining Amazon.
In Amazon’s bookstore, the unruly behavior has been widespread, aided by printondemand technology. Booksellers that seem to have no verifiable existence outside Amazon offer $10 books for $100 or even $1,000 on the site, raising suspicions of algorithms run wild or even money laundering.
“It’s unacceptable and I’m furious,” author Andrew Sean Greer tweeted after people complained last summer that fakes of his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, “Less,” were being sold as the real thing. There was a counterfeit edition of Danielle Trussoni’s acclaimed memoir, “Falling Through the Earth,” on the site that misspelled her name on the cover. Lauren Groff tweeted that there was “an illegal paperback” of “Florida,” her National Book Award nominee, on Amazon.
Technical books, which tend to be more expensive than fiction, are frequent victims. No Starch Press has tried to squelch fake editions of its computer manuals for three years. Pollock, No Starch’s founder, said Amazon had the same laidback approach to bad actors on its platform as Facebook and YouTube.
“Amazon is the Wild Wild West,” he said.
This is not really negligence on Amazon’s part. It is the company’s business model. Amazon, which does not break out revenue or profit from bookselling or publishing, assumes that everyone on its service operates in good faith until proved otherwise. “It is your responsibility to ensure that your content doesn’t violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity or other rights,” it tells prospective publishers and sellers.
At Antimicrobial Therapy, the first warning that something was amiss with the Sanford Guide came with reviews on Amazon. “Several pages smudged and unable to read,” one buyer said in 2017, posting photos as proof. “Seems as the book was photocopied,” said a second. “Characters are smeared,” wrote a third. The company, whose books were sold to Amazon by distributors, did test buys. It got some copies from Amazon and others from its thirdparty sellers, including UsedText4u, Robinhood Book Foundation and 24x7 Book. Of the 34 books that Kelly bought, at least 30 were counterfeit. None of the booksellers responded to requests for comment.
Kelly spent hours writing responses to customers who complained about their copies but didn’t realize they had counterfeits. He tried tracking down the source of the fakes and attempted to communicate with Amazon. Eventually he wrote to the retailer’s founder, Jeff Bezos, saying, “Amazon is knowingly and willfully fulfilling most orders for our title with counterfeits that may contain errors leading to injury or death of their patients.”
Kelly got a response two weeks later from “Raj,” a member of “the Amazon Seller Performance team.” Raj said that an unnamed thirdparty seller had been barred from selling the book but that the seller might now appeal directly to AMT, and that if the company wanted to retract the whole thing, here was what to do.
The Authors Guild said it was also seeing “a massive rise” in counterfeit books. “Authors tell us, ‘I know I had more sales, but I don’t see them in my royalties.’” said Mary Rasenberger, the guild’s executive director. “Amazon owns the reseller platform, and we think that’s where these books are being sold.”
Amazon fulfilled Jamie Lendino’s dream of becoming an author.
A computer buff who delights in the digital past, Lendino, 45, wrote a book called “Breakout,” about the Atari machines of the 1980s that ushered in a new era of gaming. He selfpublished it two years ago through Amazon, which charged him nothing upfront but took a commission on the 1,223 paperback copies bought by devoted Atari fans.
Then Amazon fulfilled someone’s dream of becoming Jamie Lendino.
A fellow purportedly named Steve S. Thomas took Lendino’s book a year ago and remade it as his own. Thomas got rid of the title “Breakout” and converted the subtitle — “How Atari 8Bit Computers Defined a Generation” — into the title. He put on a new cover and substituted his name for Lendino’s, though he kept all of Lendino’s biographical details about being the editor of ExtremeTech.com and writing for PC Magazine and Popular Science.
It was the latest entry in Thomas’ substantial body of
work. He also put his name on scholarly and expensive books like “Preharvest and Postharvest Food Safety” and “RealWorld Electronic Voting: Design, Analysis and Deployment,” none of which he had actually written.
Thomas’ plagiarism of Lendino brought his caper to a close. Kevin Savetz, another Atari buff, spotted “How Atari 8Bit Computers Defined a Generation.” He ordered it, though, as he noted, “the title seemed a little familiar.”
When Savetz got the book, he realized it was more than familiar and tweeted at Lendino, who was surprised someone was stealing from him.
“If you’re going to counterfeit a book, you’d pick something by Dan Brown or Neil Gaiman,” Lendino said. “You don’t pick a tech guy writing about a 40yearold computer.”
Things got weirder. Allison Tartalia, Lendino’s wife, was browsing on Amazon as all this was happening when she saw that a 152page biography of her husband had recently been published.
“I was like, ‘Honey? Someone apparently knows something about you that I don’t,’ ” Tartalia said.
She ordered a copy of the biography, which had been put together by two entrepreneurs using a rudimentary artificial intelligence program scraping material from the internet. So far, they seem to have produced 3,000 of them, including titles such as “Dick Hardt, Identity Guy at Amazon Web Services.” They sell for $15, though sales seem to be rare and satisfied customers even rarer.
After Lendino complained to Amazon about the counterfeit, the retailer wiped Thomas’ oeuvre from its store. Amazon declined to comment.
The Sanford antimicrobial guide has its roots in the work of Jay Sanford, the chief of infectious diseases at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in the 1960s and later the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. There is now a digital version, but many doctors prefer the familiar printed format.
Antimicrobial Therapy is run today by Jeb Sanford, Jay’s son; his wife, Dianne; and Kelly, who is Dianne’s son and Jeb’s stepson. It is a small operation, only 13 employees working out of a large barnlike building in Sperryville, on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The company declined to disclose its annual revenue, but the Sanford Guide is its principal product. Sales of the book have drifted lower the past few years, with a downward spike in 2018.
In retrospect, this was probably a clue to the growing abundance of fakes. “My estimate is that approximately 15 to 25% of our sales were taken away by counterfeiting,” Kelly said. “We’re talking thousands of books.”
After the guide is printed, all copies go to Sperryville. They are then shipped to wholesalers, retailers and individual buyers. The wholesalers sell the book to Amazon.
Thirdparty sellers on Amazon acquire their stock in several ways. One seller of a counterfeit copy told Kelly that she had bought the book from Amazon in one of its periodic selloffs of damaged and returned books.
Antimicrobial Therapy filed complaints with Amazon about counterfeiting last fall. The bookseller ultimately removed many of the resellers, some of whom then went to Antimicrobial Therapy and complained that they were innocent. Amazon declined to comment on the publisher.
The communications impasse between Amazon and Antimicrobial Therapy was complicated by the fact that they did not have a direct relationship. So in December, AMT opened a vendor site on Amazon, with the bookseller getting a commission of about 20% on each copy sold. Under this arrangement, Amazon tells Antimicrobial Therapy where the customer lives, and the publisher ships the book from Sperryville.
As AMT was getting ready this spring to release the 2019 guide, it proposed an even deeper integration with Amazon.
“To eliminate the possibility of Amazon facilitating the sale of counterfeit books, we would like to offer Amazon the opportunity to serve as a wholesaler of our titles, cutting out the middle man,” Kelly wrote to the company.
It was, in essence, rewarding Amazon by surrendering to its dominance.
“We’d rather not be on Amazon,” Kelly said. “But we felt like we didn’t have a choice.”
David Streitfeld is a New York Times writer.
“Being a tech monopoly means you don’t have to care about quality.”
Bill Pollock, San Francisco publisher