
In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite - newest
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-1984.html
======
TheCycoONE
Conflating reviews of different editions is the straw that makes it impossible
for the shopper. I was looking to buy a translation of 1001 Arabian Nights.
Some reviews warned of scams, some spoke positively of the quality of the
translation, but they were the same reviews on every translation and every
edition. I gave up. That much seems like a simple change too... simpler than
conflating them. The only explanation I can think of is to deceive the
customer into thinking a product is more reviewed than it is.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's not just the reviews. They conflate the different editions themselves
(making it "logical" that there's only one set of reviews -- after all,
there's only one product!), which usually gives absurd results when you go to
view the kindle version of a book that exists in more than one edition.

I'm not sure who's supposed to benefit from this. Fudging the editions seems
like you're going to a lot of extra trouble just to hurt your customers.

~~~
jandrese
This annoys me on Prime Video reviews when you see people rating a title
poorly because the DVD comes in a cheap case or lacks extras.

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p1itopre
There is indeed a problem that the article describes: book pirates with very
little oversight selling books on Amazon and making a profit for both. A
result of this practice is that people get substandard copies of books with
typos.

The headline suggests that these typos are sinister ("newspeak"). If that were
true, that would be an entirely different and also disturbing problem. I did
not find any mention of these errors to be so.

~~~
vaer-k
I think the disturbing problem lies in the proliferation of _sources_ of
misinformation, not in the motivations of said sources. We live in an age
where information distribution is so cheap and convenient that everyone has
ended up bombarded by noise, and few have the time and education or luxury to
sift through it all. In the end, maybe Orwell was wrong about the source of
the corruption of society: it's not controlled by an oligarchy or big brother;
it's an epiphenomenon of a burgeoning, hyperconnected, disorganized
collective.

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Dylan16807
> What unites all these books is that none of them paid the author anything

He's dead. None of the copies do that. I understand that the main point here
is about counterfeiting, but perhaps copyright shouldn't last more than 50
years either...

~~~
thaumasiotes
People have a way of believing that the law -- whatever it might be -- makes
terrible ideas into good ideas. From the bottom of
[https://www.kansas.com/news/state/article234237337.html](https://www.kansas.com/news/state/article234237337.html)
:

> Last year, a Chinese national who was a research professor at Kansas State
> University was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for
> stealing valuable American rice seeds — a trade secret — that can be used to
> treat gastrointestinal disease, antibiotic-associated diarrhea, hepatic
> disease, osteoporosis and inflammatory bowel disease.

God forbid someone release rice that cures various gastrointestinal diseases
into the wild. Someone might be cured!

~~~
lonelappde
Paying people for their work incentivizes them to do work. You can read about
in the US Constitution.

~~~
deathanatos
> _Paying people for their work_

This whole thread started with

> _He 's dead._

The point being that they're _not_ getting paid for their work. Perhaps their
descendants are, or far more likely these days, their employer.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's because we're talking about two different cases.

Copying without paying a >50 year old book: no real negative consequences

Copying without paying a seed that was developed in the last few years:
significant negative consequences

(Obviously there are significant positive consequences to pirating that rice.
But limited-term IP strikes a reasonable balance between getting more done and
also releasing it to the public.)

------
tareqak
Previously posted this week here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20738152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20738152)
.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/tr5tY](http://archive.is/tr5tY)

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memmcgee
Amazing how a site that started by selling books now does an awful job doing
just that. Another reason Amazon et al should be broken up.

~~~
akeck
I'd be fine with them simply being made directly liable for all piracy and
counterfeiting on any of their platforms.

~~~
mffnbs
Why isn't this considered more seriously? The pirate bay wasn't selling
torrents ffs, but they were targeted to hell and back.

~~~
jandrese
The Pirate Bay wasn't run by the worlds richest man. Bezos could fully fund
any primary challenger he wanted.

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Despegar
As I wrote in the previous HN thread:

>If you're wondering about some weird social ill plaguing society from the
tech industry, 99% of the time the root cause of it is Section 230.

Which is also relevant to the big WSJ story today about Amazon's problem with
fakes and unsafe products.

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vaer-k
"On Sunday, Amazon said in a statement that “there is no single source of
truth” [...]"

~~~
klez
I see what you did, but taking that quote out of context is a bit ironic,
given some of the points made in the article.

Which may be why you did it, to be fair. Is it?

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niix
Someone should make a start up that is the original Amazon idea and just sell
books.

