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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

I ordered a copy of Deep Learning [1] from Amazon last week. On Barnes & Noble [2] the book costs $76.80. On Amazon it is just $28.00. I received the book a couple of days ago. The pages look like it was printed using a low-resolution printer, and the ink color is uneven across pages. I am returning the book. Possible counterfeit, sold by a third party seller. On the other hand this book is also available free online [3]. Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Ma...

[2] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deep-learning-ian-goodfello...

[3] https://www.deeplearningbook.org/

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I ordered a textbook on control theory from Amazon. It arrived, but the material inside the covers is from a small animal veterinary textbook. Byaa different publisher. I took a closer look at the cover, it was poorly printed and didn't quite fit.

I'm still confused about how the vendor expected to get away with it. Did they just guess that half of people won't bother opening the textbook? And why not fill it with blank pages then?

Might just be that a large-scale counterfeit printing operation mixed up the covers and bound materials. There are probably counterfeit veterinary textbooks floating around that contain control theory materials.

Quite possible. It seems likely that the people assembling the counterfeits don’t even read English, let alone have enough interest in the material to notice.

>On the other hand this book is also available free online [3]. Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it?

No, it's not legal.

I found that Amazon sells what is presumably a genuine edition of the book for $67.

I did not realize that Amazon had started displaying other sellers as the default seller for brand new books that Amazon itself sells. It used to be that Amazon was always the default seller if they carried a book, and the only way you would see other sellers was to click on the link for other sellers. Which is the way it should be. It's insane that they've changed this.

If your price is lower than Amazon by a magic percentage, you have a good sales record, and probably other unknown factors, Amazon will grant the buybox now to other sellers on Amazon carried items.

> Maybe it is legal to print it and sell it?

The first entry in the FAQ doesn't directly address that issue but strongly suggests an answer, morally if not legally:

    Q: Can I get a PDF of this book?
    A: No, our contract with MIT Press forbids distribution of too easily copied electronic formats of the book.

I don't seen any obvious link to a licence that might confirm or contradict this impression, so if you need/want to know for sure you'll have to contact them to ask for clarification if you can't find it elsewhere.

It's likely not really about licensing. They have a contract with the publisher that presumably allows them to do certain things and doesn't allow them to do others. (I know that's been the case when I've signed a book contract.) Presumably, in this case, they're allowed to publish the full contents in web form on their site but not to publish them in a form that would allow someone to easily print the entire contents in book form.

Often these are low cost prints for students in developing countries, for example India. They're not counterfeit as such, but the quality is low to keep the price down. Not sure if that's what you got though, as they're all super cheap on Amazon.com. Normally if it's a marketplace seller it'll say where it ships from. Deep Learning RRPs about £50 in the UK.

I'm not sure what the print status of the book is. There seems to be an official MIT Press print, but my university library struggled to get a copy through the inter-library loan network because the eBook has the same ISBN.

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