A new article in the New York Times by David Streitfeld discusses some of the problems with Amazon’s book business. Many sellers are offering counterfeit books through the platform with little to no oversight from Amazon, including counterfeit copies of important medical textbooks that are poorly printed and could cause grave confusion on top of robbing the author of royalties.

“A book takes a year or more to write,” said Andrew Hunt of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, a North Carolina publisher of computer books that had at least one of its titles stolen. “But to steal the book and upload it to Amazon takes only a minute. As the expression goes, there’s a low cost of entry.”

And when someone buys a counterfeit, Mr. Hunt added, the real author may get cheated but Amazon still makes a sale. “You could ask, What’s their incentive to do something?” he said.

Yet another reason to buy your books locally from an independent bookstore that cares about quality, authenticity, and supports authors.

Article Here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/amazon-domination-bookstore-books.html