
Amazon.com's many bots feud over book-prices - barredo
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/23/amazon-coms-many-bots-feud-o.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29
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phaedrus
I ran into this same problem recently: while looking for a legitimate and very
specific car book on Amazon, all of the top hits were strange 3rd party offers
to sell the book at ridiculous markup, over $200 for a $30 book. At the time I
thought the book was just out of print and hard to find. (I eventually found
it, it was in print and for sale at normal price from the publisher.). After
reading this article I now suspect it was one of these scammer bots. I think
this poses a real societal cost: after seeing the inflated prices I very
nearly gave up on the idea of buying the book at all, which would have
deprived the book author of a sale and would have deprived me of what proved
to be a valuable reference book.

