![]() Amazon monitors listings and has “measures in place to prevent prohibited products from being listed,” Lee said, which includes a workforce of 12,000 employees and machine-learning technology. Lee stressed third-party sellers’ status as “independent businesses” that must still follow the law and Amazon’s policies. “The frustrating thing is when the biggest player in the game, Amazon, basically incentivizes this, especially when they can do something so easy to prevent it,” Harrison said.Īmazon didn’t respond to Bloomberg Law’s request for data on its enforcement efforts against counterfeit books, nor did it say whether this is an issue it tracks.Īmazon spokesperson Julia Lee said in a statement that “nothing is more important to us than customer and author trust and ensuring that customers are purchasing an author’s authentic titles.” But authors say other counterfeit sellers spring up to take their place. Sometimes, Amazon takes down the listing other times, the listings disappear on their own. In these instances, it’s the author’s responsibility to report the alleged copyright infringement to Amazon via an online form. While the bootleg e-book was only available for about a week, Harrison said negative reviews about the quality and formatting of the e-book still plague his author page. But the unavailability of the e-book on Amazon left room for a third party to upload a counterfeit, which he said Amazon allowed. Harrison had previously chosen to publish his hard copy with Amazon while selling his e-book through his personal website. Matt Harrison, a self-published author and computer scientist, saw that an Amazon seller uploaded an e-book version of his coding guide, “Effective Pandas,” that started siphoning off sales. Under his publishing contract with Amazon, Detroja said, it’s hard to understand why the company allows other sellers to ship poor-quality, illegally printed copies of his book to Prime-eligible warehouses, which often positions the copycat as the default choice for online shoppers in a hurry. Self-published author Parth Detroja has seen sales of illegitimate copies of his book “Swipe to Unlock” undercut sales of the legitimate copies-which he can identify based on the quality of the paper and printing and the size of the book, among other indicators. ![]() Overseas and domestic counterfeit publishers can easily use their own printing presses, hire print-on-demand services, or go through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing arm to produce and sell bogus copies of popular books directly to consumers on Amazon, the group said.Īuthors can take a hit on both fronts. The group reported an “explosion” in counterfeit hard-copy books, especially among commercial nonfiction and fiction titles-educational textbooks have historically been the main book-piracy target. ![]() In 2019, the Authors Guild submitted comments to the Department of Commerce that said e-book piracy alone is an industry worth roughly $315 million annually. Piracy and counterfeiting are by no means new issues to the book industry, but self-published authors often find they lack the resources and know-how to pursue individual sellers that are profiting from knockoffs of their work. “You’re beholden to them in two ways.” Piracy Problems ![]() “They’re the only vehicle-not only are they the publisher, they’re the seller,” said Katie Sunstrom, senior counsel at Mudd Law, of the dilemma Amazon authors face. But Amazon’s restrictive author contracts and the sheer number of third-party sellers on the platform spur questions about how effective any after-the-fact legal remedy can be. A new small-claims court could provide a fresh avenue for authors to recover revenue lost to counterfeit sales. Singh’s saga underscores broader copyright challenges that self-published authors face when publishing both physical and digital books with Amazon, a vertically integrated powerhouse that authors don’t always find responsive to or proactive about infringement claims. Less than a year after the book’s release, Singh said he spends several days each month pushing requests through Amazon’s take-down system for illegitimate listings, and he estimates he’ll lose 20% of his revenue this year to accounts hawking bootleg copies of his book. Singh’s guide to getting hired at Big Tech firms landed among Amazon’s top 3,000 best-selling books, but his success also put him in the crosshairs of counterfeit book printers that have proliferated on the online marketplace. When Nick Singh’s self-published book “Ace the Data Science Interview” debuted on Amazon, he thought he’d evaded a big piracy risk by eschewing e-books and only releasing hard copies. ![]()
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