What Happened to Amazon's Bookstore?

[BeckyDem]

By David Streitfeld

Dec. 3, 2021
Updated 11:36 a.m. ET

John C. Boland was poking around the Amazon bookstore when he saw the science thriller “Hominid” for sale at dizzying prices. It was $907 from Sandy Dunes Surplus, $930 from Rocky Mountain Books and $987 from Open Range Media.

He didn’t need a copy. He wrote the novel and published it himself. List price is $15.

Mr. Boland has been selling books on Amazon since 2009. He lets the bookseller handle everything for his imprint, called Perfect Crime, including printing, billing and shipping.

Excerpt:
Despite that endorsement, Mr. Boland sued Amazon at the end of August, accusing the all-devouring retailer of, in essence, eating Perfect Crime’s lunch. His suit says Amazon let Sandy Dunes and other vendors on its platform run wild with Perfect Crime titles, offering copies for ridiculous amounts. The sellers also bizarrely asserted that “Hominid” was published in 1602, a mere 409 years before it was actually issued, which further irked the writer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/technology/amazon-bookstore.html


The author John C. Boland has sued Amazon for not policing sales of his books on the site.Credit...Andrew Mangum for The New York Times

More here:
Institute for Local Self-Reliance -Non Profit
ILSR Report Shows the Real Cost of Amazon’s Success
https://www.independentwestand.org/ilsr-report-shows-the-real-cost-of-amazons-

[leftieNanner]

1. I had a similar experience - albeit much smaller

I self-published a gluten free cookbook and mostly sold it locally. Then I posted it on Amazon (paper and digital Kindle copy). I kept the books in my house and would mail one out whenever I got an order. I didn't pay much attention to it after a while.

Logged on and found that someone else had co-opted my book and was selling it for two or three times my price! I contacted Amazon and they told me (in essence) "tough shit". That's the way this works.

I have removed my account from their site and un-published the e-version.

It's still there. And there's nothing I can do about it. I don't know what a seller would do if they actually got an order for it - since the books are still on a shelf in my garage.

I will never buy anything from Amazon. Ever. They are vultures and crooks.

[a kennedy]

3. Damn, you're kidding right.....🤬 🤬 🤬 so sorry about this.

[BeckyDem]

4. That is disgusting. So sorry that happened to you!

[iemanja]

5. Amazon should be sued for that.

[localroger]

11. They would undoubtably use the Print On Demand process to make a physical book if ordered

Whoever put the illicit e-version up has probably used it as a template to lay out a paper version; that's gotten to be pretty easy. I've been fortunate that while lots of folks have mirrored my writing on the web (I specifically permit this if they don't charge for it) nobody has seriously tried to hijack the revenue producing versions. It may be because my paper version is also published via Amazon (actually by Lulu.com, but there is an arrangement to make it available on Amazon) so if anyone else tried it would clearly be a duplicate even within their own system. It's normal though for them though to have multiple affiliates selling the same physical thing, including paper books.

[Haggard Celine]

2. They send me email about books they think I might like,

and some of them are fairly expensive. I don't have the money to spend on expensive books, like more than $100, and I usually buy digital copies when available. But some people collect these books that are out of print and pay top dollar for them. And they often aren't books that you'd consider rare. Often, they're old mysteries and science fiction novels. There can't be that many people willing to pay several hundred dollars for a mystery published in the 1980s. Right?

[BeckyDem]

6. That is a good question. I don't know how many people believed

his book was hundreds of years old and paid exorbitant sums for it...but paying more for out-of-print is not unusual, correct?

Seems one issue among many is that there are no controls in place.

[Haggard Celine]

7. Yes, people would pay more for a book that was out of print,

but I wouldn't think it would be that much more, not for a book that isn't some sort of classic. I can see paying $1000 for a first edition of some classic, although those can sell for a lot more than that. But $900 for some fairly unremarkable book that just happens to be out of print? That's just gouging, it seems to me. Makes me wonder how many they sell at those inflated prices. No one I know has the kind of money to spend on things of such inflated worth, though.

[grumpyduck]

8. Well, if they're willing to pay for it...

maybe PT Barnum was right.

[nuxvomica]

9. I saw my self-published novel at ridiculous prices

That was when I first published it, and within a day there were "used copies" selling for over $100. They have since disappeared and I assume it's just because the book's not a bestseller. I was bewildered by it but I know other self-published authors who have had the same experience.

[BeckyDem]

10. Holy cow, that is nuts.

[leftieNanner]

12. Yep - me too

Cookbook, not a novel.

[mopinko]

13. i know someone this happened to too, but i dont think it started on amazon.

a biography of an artist of special interest to me. still in print for $40.
i have a search on ebay for the artist's work, so when someone listed the book, i got an email. the price was $280. it pops up every few months for a similar price. then i looked for it on amazon and there was one listed for $800! several used, all insane price.
there's one listed right now for $141.

and yeah, it pisses me off for my friend. but also because i wish more people knew about the artist.

[yagotme]

14. It went to crap several years ago.

Wife and I used to go to auctions, the ones where they sell a lot of stuff by the box. Would get a lot of used books, and I hate throwing literature away, so we set up an Amazon account, and listed them for sale. Had a couple good years, then Amazon started putting up more and more barriers to the used book sales. Final straw was requiring a State Tax License. To sell used books online? Yep. Done. Not like we were making tens of thousands of dollars on the sales, probably averaged $300 a month, or so. Average price was probably $8-$12. Had a few good ones that went well, those were a pretty rare event. (I realize that the State wanted to get it's paws on some cash, and Amazon probably had to comply, but they were making it difficult to sell prior to the Tax.)