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

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

[aussersterne]

departments. I used to be a prof at a large university. One of the reasons I left academics was that I got tired of fighting the battle about textbooks in courses that I was required to teach (faculty divvied up the 100/200 courses, everyone had to do some).

I started out as a starry-eyed young prof trying to help my students by putting alternate sources of inexpensive textbooks on syllabi. We're talking textbooks at $2 vs. $120 on the used market. Saving students a lot of dough. But that go no-noed.

So I pulled it off the syllabus and started just making verbal announcements. That also got no-noed.

So I started just requiring an office hours visit first week of semester and telling students in office hours. That also got no-noed.

So I stopped requiring the textbook and sent them to the library for optional textbook reading. That also got no-noed.

I had serious ethical qualms about forcing students—about half of whom really oughtn't find a way to "afford" it—to spend $hundreds on things that were $nearly free and being forbidden from making it $totally free by just sending them to the library.

Everyone must buy the book, I was told. There's departmental and institutional revenue at stake, I was told. Nevermind that first-year college students from underprivileged backgrounds whose entire extended families were pulling together to help them through were dropping $1k a semester on $50-75 worth of books from used booksellers.

It's just one factor in the decisions that led me out of academics, but it's a very concrete one. It felt like a slimy industry after a while, more about conning money out of people (students, taxpayers, donors and endowers) than caring about the topics at hand.

But yeah, don't blame the profs.