No Starch Press is a longtime publisher of books for developers. Over the weekend, they posted this tweet, calling out Amazon for selling a fake version of one of its books (H/T Robert Walter).
The book had the same title, same author, and a similar cover. But it was not printed by No Starch Press and, presumably, none of the money will make its way to No Starch or the author.
Book fakes have been around forever. Pretty early in my book writing career, I found out the ugly truth. When a book with any kind of demand appeared in print, the fake machinery kicked in. Someone (for me, it usually started in China) would buy a copy of the book, use a saw to cut off the spine/binding, then feed the pages into an optical character reader, creating a PDF of the book.
Once they had the fake book in hand, they could print a fake and sell it, or add the fake PDF to a torrent web site. Happened to me with every book I ever wrote.
But this particular fake appears to be surfaced by Amazon, the number one bookseller in the world. Here’s a link to what appears to be the fake. If I had not seen the original, I would never have known.
Amazon, you going to do anything about this?
“Amazon, you going to do anything about this?”
Why should they? They get a cut of every book sold through their site whether it’s real or counterfeit. No skin off their nose if the author and publisher are getting shafted.
If you buy from Amazon, if you subscribe to their prime membership, then you are contributing to the problem. We have been boycotting amazon whenever and wherever possible for over a decade.
I’m not sure I’d call “a scanned PDF on a torrent site” a fake.
Pirated, yes, but there’s a difference – especially if there was never an official PDF edition.
(On the post itself, it certainly seems odd that Amazon would allow a Createspace “edition” of someone’s book to be sold combined with its official listing without even saying “Createspace edition” or something.
I can imagine real, legit print-on-demand existing for some books, so I can see why they wouldn’t blanket-ban it, but to just let anyone make a pirate edition using their in-house POD tool is untenable.)
Why should they? Because it’s in their best interests. It’s a HUGE marketplace, and will always be hard to police. But they do actively seek to reduce counterfeiting, and for good (profitable) reasons… it keeps them top of mind as a LEGITIMATE source for products that consumers can trust. And no, they’re quite far from perfect. But that’s why they should (and do).