Fake books on Amazon an issue for publishers
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 third-party sellers, a publisher, a printer, a self-publisher,
a review hub, a textbook supplier and a distributor that now runs its own chain of brickand-mortar stores.
But Amazon takes a hands-off 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. E-commerce has taken counterfeit goods from flea markets to the mainstream, and Amazon is by far the e-commerce 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 anti-competitive behavior. And the Federal Trade Commission is specifically examining Amazon.
In Amazon’s bookstore, the unruly behavior has been widespread, aided by print-ondemand 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 Prize-winning 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 laid-back approach to bad actors on its platform as Facebook and YouTube. “Amazon is the wild, Wild West,” he said.