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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

I indirectly know of someone who makes extra money by plagiarizing little known books, changing the cover and republishing them on Amazon. I'm surprised Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism. Remember Google's digitize all books project? This would be a useful use-case for it.

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When I was an Amazon intern 7 years ago, I went to a presentation of exactly how the duplicate detector works. I won't discuss any technical details of course, but suffice it to say: it should catch these sorts of cases, so long as the books are already on Amazon in digital format.

I don't understand how your friend can get away with this.

Yeah, I don't know. I learned about this two years ago. I think he does not make much from any single book, but he has many of them. They were exercise and diet books.

Just FYI, 7 years would almost certainly put that information outside of the statute of limitations.

Most people's integrity doesn't have a statute of limitations on promises made and kept.

I wouldn't see the statute of limitations having much to do with his reputation to respective employers?

Just FYI, 7 years would almost certainly put that information outside of the statute of limitations.

I don't believe that sentence makes any sense. Do you have a legal background?

Ah, credentialism on HN. Shocker! Is it that I'm missing "in the US," or do you have other criticism more specific?

The only logical conclusion (apart from Amazon being managerially incompetent) is that they make more money this way.

"Only" is a strong word. There could be dozens of other reasons.

It could be that the system isn't working the way it's designed. It could be that the thieving authors have found a trick to fool the system. It could be that there's a single nefarious admin who takes bribes to override the system. I'll bet you can even think of a few more if you try.

Amazon thinks long term. Bezos's influence is all about that. Letting customers and authors alike be defrauded like this in order to make a few extra bucks in the short term is not what I expect from Amazon.

My explanation is that sales numbers tell them that whatever they do works and otherwise they don't care.

They have no problem selling counterfeits widely, until the stock takes a beating for it they won’t make it a priority.

We had a similar thing on eBay recently. My wife wanted to buy a book about marketing and she found it on eBay for a cheaper price. She ordered the book and when it didn't arrive she contacted the seller. The seller told her, "it's in the mail, but here, have a PDF version of it just in case". Obviously the book never arrived.

We're obviously pissed about these practises but I'm even more pissed off that there isn't even a decent way to raise this with eBay. Their feedback system is purely designed to go around in circles..

I buy a lot on ebay, and have never struggled to raise and receive refunds. Simply go to 'Purchases', hit the item and then hit 'More options' and then 'this item hasn't arrived'. Usually refund you in days. If that doesn't work you can also claim via PayPal and then on top of that you can claim via your credit card or debit card - all will happily return your money if the seller can't prove the item was delivered. Even if you didn't pay for recorded mail.

This is one of the reasons I don't sell via ebay/PayPal any more - too high a chance of someone claiming a fake refund.

What was the reputation and reviews of the seller ?

I have bought factory service manuals for car and motorcycle projects off of eBay and Amazon. Multiple times, I received 3-hole-punched photocopies stuck in a binder or bound together with some kind of tape. Every time, I e-mail the seller, my only recourse is to spend my own money and ship it back and get a refund. Amazon and eBay both don't care, because the sellers just have to claim that they are authorized resellers. They made money off the transaction, so that's why Amazon and eBay don't care... end of story.

I don't buy anything anymore without an actual picture of the phyiscal product. I didn't pay $150 for a book so that some guy could photocopy it, I wanted the original, real deal book.

If it's marketed as the book and Amazon/Ebay refuse your claim when you receive a counterfeit, just chargeback with your bank - Amazon has failed to deliver the advertised product.

Sounds like a good way to get Amazon to cancel your account. Could be bad if you consume AWS, or other Prime services.

Hasn't everyone already learned to keep your personal and work Amazon accounts heavily separated?

I'd be surprised if Amazon cancelled your account unless the issue with counterfeits happened with alarming frequency, as maintaining a good relationship (and low processing rates) with banks is far more important to them than providing service to counterfeiters.

> I have bought factory service manuals for car and motorcycle projects off of eBay and Amazon. Multiple times, I received 3-hole-punched photocopies stuck in a binder or bound together with some kind of tape.

There is a flip side to this. Being able to purchase a pirated DVD copy of Ford's official mid-1990s workshop manual and wiring diagrams (which is not a paper manual, but a win32 VB/ActiveX application) on eBay was invaluable for a recent project. The seller was up front that this was a DVD copy and charged a very reasonable $12. If you are really serious about getting factory manuals, there are communities out there with private forums and digital archives of these things. I don't do this seriously enough to get involved, so having a way to obtain that manual at all, without spending a bunch of time, was really valuable to me.

* I'm surprised Amazon has no system to detect this kind of gross plagiarism.*

There's no incentive to create such a system (I'll be optimistic and assume Amazon doesn't actually have said system yet) until you're held accountable for infractions arising from lack of possession of such a system.

I'm not sure there's any system in place with Createspace. (It may be worth observing that you upload PDFs; they could presumably extract text if they wanted to though.) But when I published a book on both Createspace and Kindle a few years back, I got an email from Amazon about the Kindle version because it detected duplicate text on various Internet sites. Parts of the book had previously been published on both my blog and on various other tech sites (by me). So, at least at the time, they did do some degree of "plagiarism" screening for Kindle.

I just needed to tell them it was my own stuff and sent them some links and things went ahead. Don't know how carefully they actually investigated although it was quite obvious it was my own work.

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