
In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite - jbegley
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-1984.html
======
chris72205
Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery
on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even
buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each
time.

Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with
eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever
brand of product they are selling.

~~~
magduf
I don't know why people rag on eBay so much. eBay is great. Well, for certain
things at least. The thing people don't get is that eBay is basically like one
giant outdoor sale that one company has organized, and then leased space to a
bunch of small vendors who have all set up their own little tents. Some of
those vendors suck, others don't, and you're going to find stuff there that
you won't see at a large brick-and-mortar retail store.

If I want to find some used auto part for a MY2001 car, Ebay is the first
place I'll look, and I'll probably find it there, because tons of auto
recyclers use Ebay to sell their parts. If I want to buy a small quantity of
some odd item, or some item only available in other countries, Ebay is again
the first place to check. In short, Ebay is perfect for finding weird things
you won't find anywhere else. You do have to be careful who you buy from
though, but the feedback ratings do a tolerably good job of helping you here,
and you won't find this on some independent website.

Amazon has indeed gotten pretty bad in a lot of ways, because you actually
don't know what you're going to get, depending on who ships the thing to you.
It's still OK I think with sellers that are more independent and ship their
own stuff, but for those the prices aren't usually very good and you might as
well just go to Ebay.

~~~
filoleg
I don't know if this is true in 2019, but 2 years ago they didn't have a
proper 2FA, only SMS verification. The issue was that someone figured out a
way to get around that, and they were able to log in and buy a lot of
expensive stuff.

I reported it to ebay, they reset passwords and set in motion the case to
refund me. I removed the perpetrator's address info, changed everything, and
two days later it repeated again (because no real 2FA, again). After this
happened twice within the same week, i got tired of it, finally got my refund,
and closed down my ebay account.

You would think that in this scenario, ebay would block the perpetrator by IP
or would at least lock the ability to set the delivery address to the same one
that the perpetrator used the first time around, but they did nothing of that
sort, allowed that person to order more stuff through my account illegally,
and left me with a lot of headache.

~~~
Crosseye_Jack
It’s still SMS 2FA. What I do is don’t have payment cards saved to the
account.

You used to be able to use your PayPal football back in the day (a paypal
branded verisign hardware 2FA) or the VIP app but they have slowly been
removing that in favour of SMS 2FA to the point where I don’t think you can
even add a VIP token if you tried (used to be that you could add one, but they
would try their hardest to make you use SMS instead).

If you had it enabled back in the day, it’s still active on your account (both
on eBay and PayPal) but you will often find your login in flow disrupted if
you still use the “old style” 2FA. (Example on some login pages but not all
you are able to login by amending your code to your password. But it’s hit and
miss and iirc you can’t use the PayPal app at all if you have 2FA enabled and
have to do business via the website.

Note: I’m aware that PayPal and eBay are 2 separate companies now. But for the
longest time they acted as one that their application flow feels every similar
to each other even still.

~~~
filoleg
I was using PayPal on my account, and they didn't have a legit 2FA back then
either (now they do, thankfully). Blows my mind that something as crucial and
attack-desirable as a payment system wouldn't have a legit 2FA in 2017, even
though random places with way less import stuff to lose like Twitch would.

------
imgabe
1984 was published in 1949, 70 years ago. The author died in 1950. If it
weren't for ridiculous US copyright laws, reputable public domain copies would
be available at reasonable prices and there would be no black market for low-
quality knock-offs.

~~~
lsc
>reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices

so I read a lot. Mostly on the kindle. Lots of public domain classics; I love
Conrad and Melville.

I'm also pretty happy to kick in ten or fifteen bucks to avoid spending time
finding the best formatted/least incorrect copy, even if the book is public
domain.

but you know what? when I buy public domain e-books, there's so much crap
mixed in that is _worse_ than gutenberg that I often end up going with
Gutenberg first these days, if my favorite publishing houses don't have a
copy.

It's actually easier, I think, for me to find quality e-books of books that
are still under copyright.

I mean, this is mostly me complaining about amazon and how they aren't really
serving my needs even when I'm begging them to take more of my money... but
it's also a point that finding reputable public domain copies is awful hard.

For those of my taste looking... my favorite publishing house for that sort of
thing is Melville house publishing; but they have something of a limited
selection of public domain reprints. (they do have their 'art of the novella'
series, which comes out in the cutest little paperbacks. And their kindle
formatting is consistently good.)

on the other hand gutenberg formatting isn't great, but it's consistently not
terrible, which is more than I can say for a lot of the dreck you find in the
kindle store. And a lot of people have a different time/money equation, and
sometimes books under copyright aren't available on the kindle at all and
paper copies can get pricy (and are way harder to read, for me at least) so
certainly public domain is a good thing that should be preserved. I'm just
saying, it's not a panacea when it comes to badly-done e-books

~~~
austhrow743
Found this here on HN a little while ago. Public domain ebooks but with higher
formatting standards than Gutenberg. Less selection as a result but might be
worth checking out:

[https://standardebooks.org/](https://standardebooks.org/)

~~~
lsc
Thank you. I'll check it out. Huh. the format they use doesn't work with the
amazon 'send to kindle' functionality.

------
whatamidoingyo
I buy most of my books on ebay from the seller "thrift.books", and some other
goodwill ebay/physical stores. They're used, and generally around $3.00/free
shipping. Some Goodwill stores have every book priced at $1.00, and have
nearly everything you'd want. I'd never buy a new book again, especially from
Amazon.

~~~
the_watcher
Agreed, thrift.books seems to be the most reliable way to get a nice physical
copy of an older book.

------
alasarmas
The writer of this piece did not note that the pen-name of the editor of the
"high school edition" of "Down and Out in Paris and London", Moira Propreat,
is an obvious pun on the phrase "more appropriate". So obvious it didn't need
to be mentioned?

------
dmart
Perhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for
important texts?

Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against
the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings,
forewards, etc.

~~~
caseysoftware
But what is the "main text" and who has the definitive copy?

At first glance, most people would think of chapter text and headings but even
that can vary from edition to edition and printing to printing and country to
country and translation to translation. How are typos/corrections handled and
who has the right to make them?

Then we need the schema/structure for the content. And that schema has to
preserve whitespace because while it's not important most of the time, other
times it's vital like in poetry. Obviously, we need to be careful of character
encodings too.

But most artists and writers consider their "work" to not just be the final
product itself but the things that go around it like cover art, dedications,
etc.

At first glance, this is an "easy" problem but gets ugly quickly. It's also
fascinating though.

* I spent a few years at the Library of Congress working on their digital preservation project so lived and breathed these questions. When we worked with records (as in the musical kind), the album and cover art was just as important as the actual music most of the time.

~~~
sgt101
Ok - your points are all valid, but they are also huge. So if we try and
address them we will get nowhere for a long time.

What would the MVP of this be? What if we had a register of signed checksums
with reputation and community selection (I trust these folks, but not these
folks, verified artist wins)?

~~~
holy_city
Imo this is just good old fashioned quality control. When you can't trust your
wholesaler you randomly sample the shipment and test it, rejecting the whole
shipment (or exact penalties) for product outside an acceptable threshold.

The publisher could supply a manuscript. It could be compared against the
manuscript database (note: not with a checksum), and if it's too similar to
other copyrighted works then it should flagged for manual review, and rejected
if identical. That way you leave the door open for new translations/editions
from different publishers, which should be treated as separate products.

Then when the shipment of physical books arrive, you sample them via OCR +
text differences and if it's outside your standards, reject it.

But like the article mentions, that's expensive.

------
zwerdlds
I'm genuinely curious - can someone explain how Amazon has avoided litigation
on this for so long?

~~~
Despegar
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.

~~~
dfsegoat
Section 230 of what code / title?

[https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/ECFR?page=browse](https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-
bin/ECFR?page=browse)

~~~
Despegar
Of the Communications Decency Act.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Section_230)

------
fnord77
sounds like the "rewrites" are scanning errors (counterfeiters are probably
digitizing the original works and errors are creeping in) and in the case of
the "gibberish" copy, quite clearly a character encoding issue.

nothing in the article points to intentional alteration, like the tone of the
article suggests

~~~
jhbadger
Most of it is scanning/encoding errors, true, but the example of the high
school edition of _Down and Out_ really does seem to be intentional alteration
-- there's no way that rewording "Come here, my chicken" to "Come here" is a
technical issue. For whatever reason, a human wanted that change.

------
varjag
Amazon had it's share of trashy classic copies for a while.

[https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Illustrated-
Platin...](https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Illustrated-Platinum-
ebook/dp/B017YB4AJ4/)

------
umvi
Could it just be that bootleg operations are scanning in the books with
cameras rigs, and then using tesseract or some similar OCR to parse the text
back out and then running it through Microsoft Word spell check to manually
resolve conversion errors?

------
galago
When Gnutella file sharing first became popular, I noticed that if I searched
for .txt files I could find popular books of the day. Sometimes I would
download them and do a find and replace operation to change the names of
characters, sometimes to my own name or of other people, just to be silly. I
think I did this with all the Harry Potter books. I also recall creating a
heavily modified version of Fight Club which had a happy ending. This isn't
really what the article is about, but it does show that some edits may well be
intentional. None of the works I modified, as far as I recall were in the
public domain at the time.

~~~
jhbadger
And about a decade ago there was a brief humor fad that consisted of modifying
public domain classic literature to add fantasy or SF features -- "Sense and
Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Android Karenina" and so on -- but obviously
the people buying those knew that they weren't buying the original works.

~~~
entropicdrifter
Who could forget "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" ? They even made a movie of
that one

~~~
jsgo
PaPaZ was the one that almost got me into Audible. The lady that was reading
it did it in an "aristocratic" delivery that just added to the humor.

------
packetpirate
I love how the High School edition of Down and Out in Paris and London says it
was edited by Moira Propeat...... in 2105.

------
weq
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If your in the game of monopolising online sales, your not here for a long
time, your here for a good time.

Fake items have made alot of people rich. Amazon needs a cut of that pie. How
else do you maintain growth year in and year out?

------
rsanaie
This is scary & ridiculous... we have to deal with #fakebooks now as well as
#fakenews?

------
GregoryVPerry
It would be great if you manbun faggots would not post paywalled articles.

