
Amazon's knock-off problem (35 Shades of Grey, anyone?) - iProject
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/?iid=HP_LN
======
Terretta
So publishing houses fill a need after all?

But seriously, in theory, crowd sourcing of editorial reviews should resolve
this. But the reviews are not as well surfaced on other devices. If you
shoulder surf the computer illiterate, you'll find it amazing what they're
happy to click unquestioningly.

The only way to combat this is either deny self-publishing (bad solution), or
improve customer trust signals to the point it's not profitable for a self-
publisher to assemble even a 23 page pamphlet.

Amazon should step up and make trust signals more prominent.

 _// "The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo" sounds much more
interesting:[http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Girl-Tattoo-Adam-
Roberts/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Girl-Tattoo-Adam-
Roberts/dp/B006Z32SC4/) _

~~~
Turing_Machine
Commercial publishers, though not as blatant about it, are nearly as bad in
their own way. A financially successful book is guaranteed to spawn hordes of
imitations from "respectable" publishing houses.

I was in a physical Barnes & Noble store not long ago and noted that they now
have an entire _section_ labeled "Teen Paranormal Romance".

~~~
ajross
That's mixing things up. Imitation isn't the problem here: clones happen of
all successful products, and that's a good thing.

The problem is _fraud_. These titles and authors (and sometimes cover art) are
_deliberately similar_ to existing products and appear designed to catch sales
from people who aren't paying attention. That's not the same thing at all.

~~~
Turing_Machine
I dunno. While I'm not a connoisseur of that genre, some of the imitations do
seem to be deliberately designed to skirt _just this side_ of the line that
would get them sued and/or indicted.

"Yeah, we'll call ours...Moonlight, and we'll make the guy a zombie, no a
mummy!, not a vampire..."

Clearly the "books" in the referenced article are way over the line, wherever
it is. That's why I said "not quite as blatant". However, I don't think the
position of that line is quite as firm as you're suggesting.

~~~
ajross
I still think you're confused. Making a Twilight knockoff about mummies isn't
going to get you sued or indicted. The content, in fact, really doesn't
matter. The point is are you deliberately trying to confuse buyers who _want_
Twilight into buying your book instead by mistake?

That's just not a feasible attack vector with brick & mortar stores, where you
can't draw eyeballs without paying for very expensive off-shelf displays. But
on Amazon, you can game the search results to put up a page that looks to an
uninformed buyer like the genuine product. That's fraud, or nearly so, and
it's absolutely not what the me-too publishing world does.

~~~
Turing_Machine
I've seen "fake O'Reilly" paper books from other publishers that use cover
designs very similar to real O'Reilly books.

They were quite obviously intended to deceive an unsuspecting buyer into
thinking the book was an O'Reilly product.

------
Ogre
A couple of years ago, my wife, who is relatively computer savvy (not compared
to HN users, just to the general public) tried to buy a Miley Cyrus album for
a young acquaintance. Instead she got a Miles Cyrus album, which was a guy
singing bad covers (though they could be a lot worse) of Miley Cyrus songs.

I still find that highly amusing, but it's also a huge failure on Amazon's
part. There's no way that was the album anyone was looking for.

~~~
citricsquid
I was going to write about this very thing a couple of hours ago although
itunes not amazon, but I think the principle is the same.

If you go to itunes and search for any popular song (pre-released songs are
the best for it) there are always a lot of shadily labelled covers that are
there to trick buyers into purchasing them. I've been caught out by it once
before (not paying much attention, see the title matches and hit "buy").

It's not like these songs aren't making sales, quite a few have a large number
of reviews (some asking wtf?) and because the character limits in itunes allow
for you to cleverly disguise the songs they are a great way to make quick
money. For example for the new Justin Bieber single "Boyfriend" there is a
group called "Justin Bieber Tribute Team", their name shows as "Justin
Bieber..." because of the cut off and they have a song out called "Boyfriend",
which is just an instrumental version of the real song, it has ~40 reviews of
people saying they love Justin and this is an amazing new song, or saying "wtf
is this".

~~~
dubya
iTunes has a preview button for all tracks, right? (Besides, "Julia bieber"
gives the cover two stars)

~~~
shykes
I once bought a $10 iBook on itunes, thinking it was the movie. There, I've
said it.

------
aristus
As of this writing there are 15 separate Amazon sellers claiming to have new
and used copies of my print-on-demand book. Their prices range from $12 to
$888.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-
listing/1461178185/sr=/qid=/r...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-
listing/1461178185/sr=/qid=/ref=olp_tab_all)

I haven't called their bluff to see whether they are just lazily-evaluating
the book (buy it from Amazon and drop-ship) or whether they are printing
copies themselves. I suspect the former, but the latter would be exceedingly
clever too.

There is no way to report spammers or otherwise find out what the hell is
going on, and I gather Amazon is uninterested in fixing the problem. Either
way they make money.

~~~
parktheredcar
I think the really interesting thing here is that the seller that is reselling
your book for $800 has what I would call a pretty good seller reputation, at
92% positive out of almost 1000 ratings. Crazy.

------
parktheredcar
My friend wanted to buy me a kickstarter-backed card game called Cards Against
Humanity which has been sold out for some time, so she forked over a good bit
of money (several times the retail price) to buy what she thought was a rare
unopened copy on Amazon. Advertised clearly as such, complete with pictures of
the _actual_ game.

It turned out what she actually got was a crappy homemade set of print-outs
made off of a PDF the company provides for people to make their own copy of
the game for personal use. Their site specifically states '...you can use and
remix our game for free, but you can’t sell it. Please do not steal our name
or we will smash you'. Needless to say, she was pretty disappointed. She
returned it and got her money back with no issue (except for the shipping she
paid for both ways); the seller claimed he had no idea he was selling
counterfeits. I imagine they made quite a bit of money doing this and taking
advantage of people too lazy to go through the return process. It's really a
shame, but sadly policing the market seems to be an extremely difficult
problem (at least economically) considering how many products are listed.

------
helipad
I had this too when I bought an iPad Smart Cover. The price is really the only
way you could know it was a knock-off product:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TEPN8M/ref=oh_o00_s00...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TEPN8M/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details)

Fortunately I just needed something cheap for a single journey I was making
using the company's device, but the fact it says the word Apple, uses their
part number & is one of the top-selling items in the category, I can see how
many would be fooled.

I read the comments and assumed it to be fake (it very clearly is), but I can
imagine most people would not get that far and happily stump up the cash -
e.g. those who don't realise that Amazon allows 3rd party sellers.

~~~
joshu
Holy shit!

Edit: Are you sure MC942ZM/A is a real apple part number? Try googling it.
Your point stands, though.

~~~
helipad
Ha, well no. But clearly it's meant to emulate an Apple SKU.

Yet another way it's using all the look and feel of an Apple item purchase to
confuse the seller.

I think the problem is that even if the buyer is aware that orders may be
fulfilled by a third party (big IF), it's not unreasonable that a buyer may
assume there's been some kind of vetting to prove legitimacy.

------
peapicker
You all should read my new book, "Grieg, Erdős, Breugel" Sincerely Yours, Hoff
Dougstadtler

~~~
muhfuhkuh
... an Eternal Silver Knot.

------
withad
I've recently noticed a lot of self-published books on Amazon that just pull
their text straight from Wikipedia articles, like this
([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-
Pictocha...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictochat-
Connection/dp/124253895X/)) or this ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-
Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-
Including-Pictochat-Connection/dp/124253895X/)). Most of them have little
disclaimers that presumably get them past Amazon's rules but they're still
cluttering up a lot of search results and doubtless tricking a few people.

------
danieldk
It's not only lookalikes that plague Amazon, but also counterfeit products.
E.g. my girlfriend once bought a Playstation 3 controller from the Amazon
marketplace. When it arrived, it looked virtually identical to the controller
that came with the PS3. I did notice that the quality seemed a bit worse, but
assumed that Sony opted for cheaper production.

Fast forward a few months, and suddenly the controller stops working. After
checking some websites, we found out that Sony disabled some series of
counterfeit controllers.

Luckily, Amazon refunded the money. But it is still a nuisance.

~~~
wmf
A while back I was looking for Thinkpad batteries on Amazon and _literally
every one_ was counterfeit (even though half of them were called "Genuine
Lenovo", they'd have plenty of comments disagreeing). It's pretty sad.

~~~
tomg
Amazon doesn't do much to filter out counterfeit items, it seems. From
personal experience, a non-trivial number of shoe merchants on Amazon sell
fakes.

------
DarkShikari
This sounds similar to what The Asylum does
(<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAsylum>); they make extremely
cheap knockoffs of big-name movies, like "Transmorphers", and rely on people
not paying attention to inadvertently buy or rent their movies. It's
apparently incredibly profitable.

~~~
Dylan16807
Or less cynically they make funny knockoff movies that a lot of purple watch
on purpose. The book thing is pure scam.

------
heliostatic
This is not a new problem. It's been common long enough, at least, that Monty
Python made a lovely sketch about it several decades ago:
<http://www.montypython.net/scripts/bookshop.php>

~~~
robocat
[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+bookshop+j...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+bookshop+john+cleese+connie+booth)

Brilliant. Is there a subculture of collectors of "fake" products sold on
Amazon? Surely some people prefer fakes...

------
draebek
Razor blades seem to be another thing _supposedly_ often counterfeited on
Amazon. See <http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000277P5E> for example.

~~~
jrockway
But I'm assuming you're safe when the item "Ships from and sold by
Amazon.com."

------
drcube
I don't see how this is a problem at all.

It's no different than stopping at "Dairy King" and being disappointed in the
ice cream. Eat somewhere else next time.

In fact, there are plenty of legitimate artistic works that have the _exact
same name_. You can't copyright a title, and you shouldn't be able to. Maybe
Isaac Worthington, with a little practice, will become a well-respected
writer. Certainly you can't blame a guy who wrote a book about Steve Jobs for
calling it "Steve Jobs".

------
27182818284
For the biggest acts it feels like the solution was already found (for the
most part) by Twitter with their fancy verified checkmarks.

------
Herring
There have been a lot of anti-amazon articles lately.

------
J3L2404
I've seen similar shenanigans at brick and mortar stores where what looked
like a "Sharpie" was actually a "Skerple" with a clever font. Lame.

~~~
TheAmazingIdiot
I've seen the same at Big Lots as "Shapiro".

They wear out in 2 or so days.

~~~
robocat
Try the "Staunion" brand fake Sharpies - worked well for me ;-) . Some fakes
can be better than the real thing (There was a fake Syma clone mini-copter I
kept buying more of because they were better than the real ones in particular
ways).

In countries with poor counterfeit product policing, consumers learn which
fakes to buy, or which sellers to trust. Just like buying LSD or Ecstasy :-)

------
gcb
if you think book knockoffs are amazon's biggest problem, try to buy anything
else!

it's like browsing dealextreme.com

101% of the non-book products are either:

    
    
       a) not the real brand
       b) appears on the listing as $3.00 with $17.99 shipping

~~~
DanBC
A bigger problem for me is the almost totally broken search.

Try searching for Fuze (Sansa Fuze, an MP3 player) and then selecting "in
Electronics & Photo" and then sorting by price.

You end up with pages and pages of power adaptors; cords; cases; screen
covers; etc. And the paging mechanism for Amazon only lets you scroll one page
at a time.

There are very many examples of this.

