Sting on Amazon Booksellers Aims To Weed Out Counterfeit Textbooks, But Small Sellers Getting Hurt (cnbc.com)

Amazon upended the book industry more than two decades ago by bringing sales onto the web. Now, during the heart of the holiday shopping season, the company is wreaking havoc on used booksellers who have come to rely on Amazon for customers. From a report: In the past two weeks, Amazon has suspended at least 20 used book merchants for allegedly selling one or more counterfeit textbooks. They all received the same generic email from Amazon informing them that their account had been "temporarily deactivated" and reminding them that "the sale of counterfeit products on Amazon is strictly prohibited."

[...] The crackdown on textbook sellers stands out at a time when Amazon is dramatically stepping up its broader anti-counterfeiting efforts, suspending third-party sellers across all its popular categories. Unlike most suspensions, which tend to occur after complaints from consumers or from brand owners who are monitoring the site for counterfeits, these booksellers got caught up in what appears to be a coordinated sting operation.

Comments

How can they say these are fake?

[SuperKendall]

If you read through the article, one of the books was a used donated book ten years old.

How can anyone say if a ten year old book is counterfeit? That alone seems pretty suspicious.

It sure does end up looking like Amazon is simply shutting down people selling any used textbooks...

If I were an Amazon seller no way would I ship anything to the address and person mentioned in the article, though probably they will just switch to a new name and fake address...

Re:It's not the professor. It's the schools and

[Immerman]

As someone who spent a few years teaching college courses, I can't think of any group better qualified to write such a book, except possibly a really exceptional student. Knowing the subject is one thing - teaching it well is something else entirely.

I only had one professor that I know of who wrote a text book (computer science), and he made a point of making it available free online. Of course this was a greybeard Linux enthusiast (may his rest be joyous) at an edge-of-nowhere university who's mission statement involved creating opportunities for under-served populations. So not necessarily the sort of place representative of the industry.

Re:It's not the professor. It's the schools and

[serviscope_minor]

If EVERY prof said "Cut this shit out or we resign" the university / colleagues would change their tune.

Profs gotta eat too. If you have no social safety net that allows for that sort of ethical action then this is exactly the sort of thing that can happen. Being able to eat and make rent is almost always going to come top.

And when you say "every" you're not far off. Academia is hugely competitive with people devoting their life for the chance for a job when there's 10 times as many people as there are jobs.

Even if only half of them did that it would not take the universities long to refill.