From Publishing Perspectives:
As Publishing Perspectives will remember, when The New York Times’ David Streitfeldwrote in June that “Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore,” resulting in what the Authors Guild said has been a surge of counterfeit books, the retailer responded at unusual length to defend itself and its intentions of consumer protection and quality assurance.
On Monday (August 19), the San Francisco-based veteran Amazon observer and journalist published a new piece in the Times, in which he recounts buying “a dozen fake and illegitimate Orwell books from Amazon.”
For book industry players and those who respect literature, the story is harrowing and illustrates how many in the books business see what Streitfeld earlier has described as “a kind of lawlessness” in how Seattle sells books.
And yet, once again, a Streitfeld piece has elicited a substantive response from Amazon, indicating at the very least that the vast tech company does not take lightly the sorts of weaknesses the reporter discerns in its work–and making a case to publishing people for a “single source of truth” on copyright status.
. . . .
In describing the bad editions of George Orwell books he was able to order from Amazon, Streitfeld writes that some “were printed in India, where the writer is in the public domain, and sold to me in the United States, where he [Orwell] is under copyright.
“Others were straightforward counterfeits, like the edition of his memoir Down and Out in Paris and London that was edited for high school students. The author’s estate said it did not give permission for the book, printed by Amazon’s self-publishing subsidiary. Some counterfeiters are going as far as to claim Orwell’s classics as their own property, copyrighting them with their own names.”
In cases of such illicit content, of course, rights holders are being stiffed, as Streitfeld reminds us, and the readership is being sold bogus and often badly corrupted work. “After all,” he writes, “if you need a copy of Animal Farm or 1984 for school, you’re not going to think too much about who published it. Because all editions of 1984 are the same, right? Not always, not on Amazon.”
. . . .
Indeed, a lot of what Streitfeld describes in these bogus editions is remarkable as much for how small and random the changes seem to be as anything else. In that “edited for high school” version of Down and Out in Paris and London, for example, the bowdlerized result removes “my chicken” from Charlie’s call to a young seduction victim, “Come here, my chicken.” Can it possibly have been of much concern that a modern high school student might encounter the phrase “my chicken” in this context?
None of this is acceptable. Particularly in an age in which truth itself is under a furious assault by political forces in the United States and many other parts of the world, the protection of every author’s and publisher’s work is mandatory.
And Streitfeld is correct when he writes that the arrival of the biggest seller of books in history has presented an unprecedented challenge in which counterfeiters can profit from their ability to cheat us all: “Until recently,” Streitfeld writes, “improving Orwell was not a practical business proposition.
“Then Amazon blew the doors off the heavily curated literary world. No longer was access to the marketplace determined by publishers, booksellers, or reviewers.”
While Amazon is the company that has, he’s right, made it possible for “even the most marginal books” to be “suddenly available to everyone everywhere” from the most earnest but artless authors (self-published or from the trade), it also can enable the chicanery of ruthless forgers.
Books people struggle with this perhaps more than lawn mower manufacturers or apparel makers. As Faber & Faber’s director of digital and new business Henry Volans once said during a conversation in London, “Publishing has taken the digital disruption rather hard.”
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Publishing Perspectives has been provided by Amazon with a response to Monday’s Streitfeld article.
[PG asks: Is he alone in questioning the sentence structure of this bit?]
. . . .
(From Amazon’s response)
“The books in question are authentic titles provided to us by publishing houses and distributors for sale in our US store.
“However, there is an issue of differing copyright timing between countries and sometimes even different titles within the same country.
“Today, there is no single source of truth for the copyright status of every book in every country that retailers could use to check copyright status. Retailers are dependent on rights holders to tell them where they have the rights for each title and for how long. Without a single source of correct information, this is a complex issue for all retailers–a number of the books in question are for sale in the stores of several other US book retailers, from independent bookstore Web sites to large chains.
“We work with rights owners to quickly resolve questions about what publisher has what rights in each geography because only the rights holders know the disposition of the intellectual property rights to the works that they represent. We have removed these titles from our US store, and we have informed the publishers and distributors who listed them.
“We believe that a single source of truth for the copyright status of every book in every country would help all booksellers.”
. . . .
But neither can any level of vetting succeed in catching all counterfeited content. Streitfeld points out, “If Amazon vetted each title the way physical bookstores do, it would need lots more employees.” And even a good hands-on examination might miss faces changed to feces in an otherwise expertly produced copy of a book.
. . . .
At the same time, Streitfeld has put his finger on a problem in how Amazon at times displays its consumer reviews of books. “Amazon sometimes bundles all the reviews of a title together,” he writes, “regardless of which edition they were written for. That means an unauthorized edition of Animal Farm can have thousands of positive reviews, signaling to a customer it is a valid edition.”
In comments made on background by the company, Publishing Perspectives has determined that Amazon knows clearly the complaint Streitfeld is making but may not be convinced that exact matches of reviews to a given edition would prevent problems. There are, for example, consumers who might complain about what they consider to be poor-quality printing in a book that nevertheless is an authentic work.
And Amazon is correct that it’s not alone in carrying some of the precise bad Orwell editions that Streitfeld has pointed to here. Some of them can be spotted on competitors’ sites, including those of Barnes & Noble and the independent powerhouse Powell’s. Needless to say, a determined counterfeiter may find it pays well to spread his or her tawdry work to as many points of sale as possible.
. . . .
The Authors Guild reports good cooperation from Seattle in working on problems the guild’s member-authors run into sometimes in working with Amazon. Perhaps an organization like the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) led by Brian O’Leary could look into the development of some of the data centralization that Amazon’s developers believe could strengthen their ability to spot bad material.
. . . .
Update: 11:38 a.m. ET August 20: To help represent the kind of response that many in the industry will have to Amazon’s stance, we’re adding here part of the comment from Michael Cader today in his edition of Publishers Lunch, published shortly after this story. Cader refers to Amazon’s arguments as “worthy of a child. Both in the statement and on further background they complain that it’s hard, that other people do it too, and that it’s somehow your (the industry’s) fault for not having a universal catalog of every right throughout the world. It all ignores the fact that this is a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Their ‘global store’ initiative that started in mid- to-late 2017–which makes the default to sell everything everywhere, unless someone actively complains about rights issues–directly aligns with the explosion of infringing book editions.”
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
PG will note that he is against counterfeit books and the failure of any publisher, small or large, to respect the rights of the owners of the copyrights to those books and pay appropriate royalties for properly-licensed books.
However, PG notes the OP is less about the existence and sale of counterfeit books by Amazon and any other ebook seller and more about a hard-core resistance to change in the world of traditional publishing (including the world of newspaper publishing) and an unwillingness to adapt to a digital world which most consumers really like, both in English-speaking nations and elsewhere.
PG says the traditional book industry, whose profits have been greatly aided by Amazon during a period in which the amount of leisure reading done by Americans (and perhaps residents of other nations) has been in significant decline, seem to want to turn the clock back to 1990 and somehow erase online commerce.
As PG has pointed out before, traditional publishing has committed a serious strategic error by overpricing ebooks. The reasons, of course, have been an irrational hatred of Amazon and the accompanying desire to prop up sales of traditionally-printed books and the bookstores that sell them.
In a purely rational book publishing world, traditional publishers large and small would be happily reaping profits from increases in sales of reasonably-priced ebooks while gently nudging printed books toward a respectable antiquarian retirement. (From an ecological standpoint, think of the millions of trees that would be saved along with the birds and tiny creatures whose forest homes would remain secure.)
Of course, the publishers would still have their secret worries about Kindle Direct Publishing and the steady stream of popular and talented authors, both new and established, who are going indie due to both the increased income and increased power over their own careers that KDP provides.
Besides, Amazon is consistently ranked as one of the most-admired companies in the world. PG doesn’t remember ever seeing any of the huge media conglomerates that own the major New York publishers (or, to come to think of it, The New York Times and its wealthy owners) on any most-admired list. Indeed, PG would rank these huge media conglomerates as among the most retrograde large business organizations found anywhere.
In a purely rational book publishing world, traditional publishers large and small would be happily reaping profits from increases in sales of reasonably-priced ebooks while gently nudging printed books toward a respectable antiquarian retirement.
A rational publisher maximizes his own welfare and acts in his own self-interest.
It’s reasonable for him to ask what are his competitive advantages? What does he do better than everyone else?
I’d suggest the answer is the production and distribution of paper books. Publishes do that better than any independent author.
Do publishers have a competitive advantage in eBooks? What is it? What do they do better than independent authors using Amazon?
I’d say their competitve advantage in eBooks is carry-over from their advantage in paper. Paper provides cross-promotion that helps the publisher’s eBook.
So, what happens when a publisher drops eBook prices to a point where he loses his paper sales? He loses the cross promotion paper gives him in eBooks. He loses his only competitive advantage in eBooks. What happens when he loses paper bookstores? The same thing.
Antiquarian retirement of paper dooms the publisher. He is now just another guy hitting the Amazon upload button.
A rational publisher holds on to paper, and balances it against eBooks for as long as he can.
At the same time, Streitfeld has put his finger on a problem in how Amazon at times displays its consumer reviews of books. “Amazon sometimes bundles all the reviews of a title together,” he writes, “regardless of which edition they were written for. That means an unauthorized edition of Animal Farm can have thousands of positive reviews, signaling to a customer it is a valid edition.”
In comments made on background by the company, Publishing Perspectives has determined that Amazon knows clearly the complaint Streitfeld is making but may not be convinced that exact matches of reviews to a given edition would prevent problems. There are, for example, consumers who might complain about what they consider to be poor-quality printing in a book that nevertheless is an authentic work.
Emphasis mine. I think the humans writing that algorithm are humans who do not read much, at all, and this is why they miss the point so spectacularly in this instance. Streitfeld shares their blindness in a way, because he also misses the point for why this practice is stupid: the books aren’t interchangeable.
Amazon treats translations as interchangeable, and doesn’t grasp that you might want the Fagles or the Lattimore or the one translation from the 20th century vs. the one from the 17th century. The algorithm writers devalue the worth of the book reviews by dumping all the reviews for all the translations into the same pot. I don’t waste time looking on Amazon when I want to figure out which edition of a classic I want to read.
And when I want the e-book edition, I do care if it’s a badly scanned OCR versus one that someone made properly. The bad scan should not have the reviews of the properly formatted ebook attached to it, because that just means I can’t trust the review that says it’s formatted properly.
Worse, suppose you track down which edition of a given classic you want to read, and you find the dead-tree version on Amazon. Clicking on the “Kindle” version may turn out to be from a completely different source, a different translation or whatever. Not the same one you were trying to buy.
Streitfeld’s focus, and that of Publishing Perspectives — that readers care if the Orwell edition is from Australia or India or America — is silly. It’s rare that a reader cares about that, unless one edition is more “complete” or “uncensored” or some such. Amazon is correct that readers don’t care whether the edition is “authentic” in that sense. The practice of dumping all reviews together is still wrong, just for a different reason.
“It’s hard” and “everybody else is doing it too” — isn’t that what the legacy publishers were saying about insanely high prices (sometimes higher than the print version) for ebooks? I am so delighted to learn that this is Wrong and Bad and eagerly await the reasonably priced electronic versions to come.
Further, I would like to point out to the OP author that counterfeiters do not counterfeit things when there is an affordable authentic version of an item in demand.
And producers don’t lower prices unless their total profit will rise. They have to ask about the real effect on their bottom line from competing with counterfeiters.
Publishers don’t have the analytical chops to determine what their total profit will do. We’re talking about the people who invented Whale Math here.
Oh, no. I just had a thought, and once thought, I cannot unthink it.
– David Streitfeld. How do we know that he even exists. That may be a “house name” used by the NYTimes for anti-Amazon screeds.
– The other thought I had: What a wonderful name for a character. I will use that in the future, and he will never know that it is him. HA!
BTW, to put what Streitfeld is saying in context, look at the NYTimes from 2009 when “everything” hit the fan:
Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
Now here is what I find interesting. I know a number of people who are outraged by Amazon pulling 1984 from Kindle. They refuse to buy Kindle ebooks, and will NEVER publish on the Kindle platform. (Note the shouting of NEVER. They literally have hissy fits like that. HA!)
The point these people keep missing, is that the copies removed were “illegal” copies. It says that clearly in the 2009 article, and in all other articles from that time, yet people conveniently missed that fact. That is what Amazon should be doing, yet they tried to say that they may have made a mistake pulling the illegal copies.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
So the result is that Amazon is still having to play whack-a-mole on illegal copies of 1984, and people are still having hissy fits about both the removals and the presence of bad copies.
What’s interesting, the people I mentioned above are the same ones who will only buy ebooks that they can “backup” to their own storage, i.e., in epub format. They are under the delusion that an ebook is theirs to own.
When I hear people rant like that, I remember the basic fact that “e” is for “ephemeral”. There will come a point where their collection of “e-copies” will be corrupted, or vanish with one too many upgrades to their system, so let them make as many “backup” copies as they like, “bit rot” will take them all.
In describing the bad editions of George Orwell books he was able to order from Amazon, Streitfeld writes that some “were printed in India, where the writer is in the public domain, and sold to me in the United States, where he [Orwell] is under copyright.
This appears to be perfectly legal?
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
IANAL and I don’t even play one on TV, but this looks pretty cut and dry. Not that it doesn’t stink getting an error filled book, of course.
Streitfeld has correctly identified the salient feature of the business model of Amazon, as well as the other tech giants: to use algorithms rather than humans, who are more expensive, to make judgments. Once you realize this, many of their actions make perfect, if discreditable, sense.
PG’s commentary is classic deflection. A piece talks about counterfeit copies of books. This doesn’t fit the desired narrative of “traditional publishing sucks!” so we are told that the piece isn’t really about counterfeit copies of books at all, then digresses into a discussion of ebook pricing.
Counselor, were I a member of the jury, I would take this to mean that you don’t have a response to the other side’s argument, and was hoping I wouldn’t notice. I did, and would vote accordingly.
Thing is, it’s not irrational behavior, if you look at it from a certain point of view. The BPH’s dominance was never based on their ability to determine what readers wanted or what was actually quality litratchure–it was their access to and control of printing presses and distribution channels, and they know it.
Once you understand that, everything makes sense.
Well, he does have a point that Amazon really messes up when it comes to reviews of different editions of classics, especially when those books occur in different translations. For example, reviews of Don Quixote/Don Quijote will be for all the editions by different translators, including poorly OCR’d public domain translations. Conscientious reviewers will compare translations and identify specific translations within their reviews, but it is a huge blind spot on the part of Amazon and does make it more difficult to avoid buying fakes or outdated editions.
Agreed, MKS.
This is not only true for books, but for everything else I’ve looked at on Amazon. Sometimes, the item the review is for is identified, but not always.
I’m not sure I can get more excited about books in this context than other items.
The item reviewed may or may not matct the item who’s sale page you are looking at.
“For book industry players and those who respect literature,”
Meaning those trying to make the most bucks from the system?
Oh wait, I’m wrong, they don’t define 99.9% of the stuff offered as ‘literature’ in the first place. Funny how they still want/sell non-literary books/stories.
Of course what is really upsetting them in that many authors and readers are bypassing trad-pub’s gatekeeping (and toll collection) at prices trad-pub doesn’t want them getting used to.
And no number of blogs by Publishing Perspectives or The NYTs is going to change the fact that trad-pub and friends have got to adapt or die …
They are also whining about cheaper editions from other countries that are legitimately printed in those countries.
Out of the other side of their mouths, they whine about tariffs causing their costs to rise for books that they have printed in Red China.