In her case, she ordered author copies (that gives you no royalties, of course) and got the same copies sold again to herself as author copies.
In my case, I also ordered author copies, but they were resold to a normal customer after I returned them.
From an order of 50 author copies, I returned 14. Packaging was fine, so it wasn’t a problem with how they bumped up during shipping. They were misprinted, or had folded covers (they tear easily after a fold, really bad), some were printed beyond the bleed area (that’s what bleed is for, you can’t be printing beyond it), and a few were printed slightly off angle. One particularly bad copy was even cut an inch smaller than it should’ve been, trimming every single page and cover, text and all.
So yeah, that’s why I returned them. But I do give you that some of those defects would go completely unseen by someone at a warehouse. You flip through the book, all pages seem to be there, but how is a person there supposed to know what the margins of the book look like? But most errors would not pass a regular printing press QC, particularly the damaged covers.
Also, Amazon both prints and distributes these books, so QC is in their hands from the start.
Thanks for chiming in! If you don't mind, I'm trying to understand the exact accounting implications of this for you.
In the context of self-publishing, what does it mean to order "author's copies"? Are they:
A) offered for free, like they would be as part of a traditional publishing contract?
B) Sold to you "at cost" of printing and shipping without any markup?
C) Sold above cost but with a discount greater than or equal to size of the royalty?
D) Sold above cost but with a discount smaller than the size of the royalty?
E) Sold at full retail price but without any royalty?
I very much doubt A because then Amazon would basically be operating what amounts to a free vanity press. But maybe they'd throw in a couple as a perk.
I also doubt B because then they would be operating a revenue-neutral vanity press, but maybe it would still be worth it to them if they counted on gettong enough non-author sales to make enough margin to fund the operation.
I also doubt D or E, because if so, then why would anybody order "author's copies" of their book?. Just get your friend to order them for you and reimburse them and you'll come out ahead.
I would guess the answer is C. But in that case, it seems to me that you are getting implicit royalty on those "author's copies", but those royalties are baked into the discounted price rather than being distributed to you later. (I suppose this might also have advantageous tax implications for you on those implicit royalties, compared to the alternative where you just order normal copies and get your royalties later.) Am I wrong about this?
Yep, it’s B, supposedly sold without a markup, although I’m sure someone must be making some money. They do limit the number of author copies to 1000 (per year I guess? Haven’t checked), so that people don’t just abuse that and sell all outside of Amazon.
I assume Amazon thought the author was too picky, so they shipped him another 14 books from their inventory and put the 14 he returned into inventory.
I frequently get books that have the errors this author described. It's normal in cheap books. I've even seen those errors in guilt-edged, leather-bound collectible books.
If you care about the condition of books you buy, don't buy from Amazon. They'll throw a $100+ hardcover in a lightly padded envelope and chuck it around. Or they'll put it in a box with some other random item and a few inflatable shipping bags, but not enough to keep things from shifting around freely.
I've stopped buying books from Amazon as _every_single_one_ comes with the corners dinged, the covers scratched, and often times bent in half one way or the other.
If I happen to want a self-published-printed-by-amazon book (ie. not available at any other store), I'll really think twice about it, as the quality is probably total crap. The last one I got had screenshots that were all unreadable (and the main content was mostly in the screenshots, without explaining text otherwise), and looked like it was printed at about 15 dpi.
OOTH, I've never had problems with BN or Bookshop.
Their packing has gotten comically bad, particularly for sensitively items like books and such. I've greatly reduced my Amazon buying over the years due to issues with damaged items, and lately, Amazon is getting more aggressive about discouraging returns. But I'm not going to pay $30+ for a new hardcover that comes damaged and covered with dirt and grime.
It seems like all shipping companies have gotten comically bad in the past year or two. This past summer I mailed boxes to seven family members via USPS. Only 3 of 7 boxes made it to their destinations intact. Three were delivered but destroyed, crushed, like either someone drove over them with a truck or literally jumped up and down on them several times, and one just disappeared. UPS has also delivered to me several completely destroyed packages in the past few months, also looked like they were driven over by trucks.
Same here, noticed a lot of stuff from Amazon lately arrived in a condition as if somebody used it as a piñata. Fortunately, for the stuff I ordered it didn't really ruin anything except the external packaging, which I didn't need anyway, but I hate to think what it'd done to a book...
> Personally i think this is a great move that reduces overpackaging and its associated environmental impact
I've chosen to do Amazon's Amazon Day Delivery service several times, but I have stopped doing it, basically without a choice. It's guaranteed to worsen the packaging. They just throw everything in a big enough (normally bigger than it needs to be) box and put a piece of paper in there and call it good. It's just unacceptable. Plus, their incentives for doing so are not good, often non-existent, and you are still paying the full Prime price, which keeps increasing.
In theory, the boxes that items come in - especially electronics - should be good enough for shipping, they're often full of padding and the exterior is glossy / lightly water resistant; I've ordered a few items that came without a box like that, it's fine, the packaging has no value. It's more that retailers can be anal about box quality because that's how items were sold at one point.
100% agree. Just about every book I've bought from amazon has arrived severely damaged due to crap packaging. I wanted to buy a really nice limited release folio recently, but for some reason the printer only sold it through Amazon. Why would you sell your $200 art book through a company that guarantees 90% of them will be trashed? I emailed the printer, they confirmed the books were only available through amazon, I bought one, and returned it because it looked like it had been thrown down a flight of stairs.
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders many years ago did use packaging that completely protected books from damage. I guess they found there are enough people who really don't care, so that the sellers don't have to care either.
Before getting pitchforks out, I'd like to see what this person considered "damaged". If - and I know this is a big if - but if it's something extremely minor, such that almost anyone would consider it to be in "like new" condition, then frankly that would be a case of Amazon doing the right thing, rather than pulping a perfectly good book and printing a new one. The fact that this person is apparently not providing any photos of said damage makes this hard to judge (and honestly raises my suspicions a bit).
> Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed.
Why wouldn't this be true? Why would a return that is then resold result in a double royalty payment? Is that something that happens for traditionally-published books that are returned and resold?
It might have to do with the fact that these particular books were "author's copies" but I don't have enough information about how those work in a print-on-demand context to know whether this actually results in a loss of royalties in this case. Did they pay for them to be printed as a self publisher or were they provided for free as part of a contract with an external publisher? Does Amazon's internal system distinguish between "author" copies" and other orders, or do you just order some copies of your own book via the standard interface? Would the author's replacement copies go through that same system or would they be printed like normal and incur royalties? No idea.
I received a book that had been written all over, full of notes and scribbles... it was sold as "new".
I complained, and they sent another.
That too was scribbled all over, notes on every page.
The book wasn't that expensive, I was a bit annoyed, but it's a rounding error to me, so I just ordered another thinking no way would this happen again, and because I did need it quicker than I cared to go through the service desk again.
The third was also marked on every page.
I complained, and they gave a refund for the 2nd one but not the 3rd... all of them were ruined though, none of them could be gifted (which was my intent), and ultimately I just sent it to landfill / recycling / incineration.
I keep learning, if I actually care about what I receive I avoid using Amazon. They're fine for some things, but the list of things they're fine for seems to be ever decreasing.
All of this was UK btw, YMMV elsewhere and with different categories of goods, etc.
Also, when I got the refund, which took about 20 minutes of my time, the tone was weird "congratulations, we're able to offer you a refund today"... this wasn't a prize, it was crappy goods and you weren't even fully setting me good, I dread to think of the number of refunds for obviously damaged goods are not honoured such that this was worthy of congrats.
And that's just the immediately visible problems. In some product categories it's difficult to find a single product where the description doesn't outright lie about features or quality, and the only way to tell is the price.
Louis Rossmann recently tested some of the highest-rated fuses sold on Amazon. It took over 8A to blow a 2A fuse.
By now I only order there if I can't find a more local alternative, the only remaining area where Amazon is still ahead (or rather, not behind) are delivery times.
There's a lot of 'That depends...' when it comes to fuse ratings; for instance, a tardy porcelain fuse of the kind used domestically in Scandinavian countries until fairly recently were rated to take 90% over rated load for 1hr before melting; they were basically only going to provide short circuit protection.
Depending on the category of fuse and the time it held at a lower current before ramping it up to 400%, it may have operated as intended.
(Squinting at the C type trip diagram in my fuse box, it appears the fuse will withstand 2x rated load for 6 seconds before tripping, 4x for 1.5 seconds or so.)
I don't rate it highly, but the person who I was gifting it to expressed an interest in trying it.
the three copies I had were all completely filled by other people, meaning I'd received three peoples deepest internal reflections and outpourings in addition to the books all being ruined by being so heavily written in. I've no idea where Amazon gets their books from, these were all sold by Amazon (which was my attempt to try and avoid marketplace things).
I can see why you'd imagine study aids, I guess that happens too.
But is that any time a book is returned and resold, or is it just for a few "author's copies" that (I would guess) weren't eligible to receive a royalty in the first place?
He's saying that he got some author's copies from Amazon, some of which he returned for being damaged. Rather than scrap those, Amazon resold the damaged copies as new. This robbed the author of a sale.
Not if it's a special author's copy with no royalties.
It's not completely clear what's going on, maybe returns cause other issues, but he's claiming no royalties from either sale. If he's not just confused that's a big deal.
Correct, author copies have no royalties, that’s what I was claiming there. So if Amazon resells those after I return them, it won’t register as a new print. Expanded more on it on another reply to this thread.
>Why would a return that is then resold result in a double royalty payment?
This was not marketed as a resold return to the customer, they were told they were buying a new book.
It obviously results in a loss of royalties - the customer goes to buy a new book, no new book is printed. Rather, Amazon sends a returned copy, and the author doesn't get the royalty that's paid when a new book is printed.
I'm calling it "damage" just for simplicity's sake on the note, although some were properly damaged (bent covers, weird creases, etc, although not during shipping since they were surprisingly well packed in this case), while some were miscut/misprinted.
Regarding royalties, it's better explained on the reply I posted to the main thread. But I'm still unsure about how that might resolve, but I have the specific order number and will try to get an answer. I have not had time to deal with KDP support yet (will as soon as I get home next week).
"That’s one page out of 600+, I returned 14 books: one was cut to the wrong size (actually cutting the text, like an inch smaller), others had totally bent covers and pages, others were printed beyond the bleed area (offset too far from the max allowed), or printed at an angle."
to me it seems a bit dramatic, if a customer felt that was an issue they'd just get a refund from amazon
It's not even that big an if. Every vendor of every product receives returns. And every vendor of every product has some kind of process for deciding what to do with them. A few product areas have specific regulation, but in general if you get an unused return that is still in new condition you're going to resell it. It's no different for Amazon than your corner bookstore, who does exactly the same thing.
Basically this author did a bulk order of his own book from Amazon[1], found something wrong, deliberately returned them and then laid a deliberate trap just to generate exactly this buzz.
[1] Pretty weird to begin with. Marketing copies of your own work are normally part of your contract with the publisher. Why is he getting them retail?
Going by the bsky thread posted elsewhere, he's using Kindle Direct Publishing, so he is getting them from his publisher, Amazon. And the books he returned were author copies, sold to him at print cost.
Then why did he lay this trap? Again, this wasn't an accidental discovery, he knew or suspected he could get this publicity by going to war against his "publisher". I'll be honest, everything about this screams "bad faith" to me. Amazon didn't do anything that any other company wouldn't have done. Arguably-slightly-flawed-but-still-fine returned junk goes on the shelves of every store in the world. This is the only guy who planted bombs in it.
> What's bad faith about not wanting a defective product to be sold with your name on it?
Come on... If he was upset about the publishing quality he would have tweeted about that when he got the books, letting his fans know he was upset about it. He planted metaphorical bombs in these books and returned them! You know as well as I do he was looking for outrage, not book quality.
Intended result with made up numbers for purpose of illustration.
Author pays 10x$10 for copies of their book to have/give away. No royalties are owed to anyone on these copies. 5 are returned as damaged they are refunded 50.
100 copies are sold at $20 and 2 per unit are paid to author.
Authors balance sheet
-100
+50
+200
Net +150
What actually happened
-100
+50
+190
Net 140
By re-using the royalty free copies which ought to have been destroyed as damaged they directly took money out of authors pocket and put it into their own whilst dishonoring the spirit of the agreement to pay n dollars per unit.
They didn't bitch about damaged product because such fuck ups come out of Amazon's bottom line whereas a form of theft literally every real publisher would recognize as theft comes out of theirs.
That’s exactly it (I’m the author). Now, regarding the “bomb” comment, it certainly was that—I saw someone post about this and wanted to see if I was suffering from the same issue, so I’m glad I planted those bombs to verify. And I see nothing wrong with doing it as an exposé on social media, because that’s how you get Amazon support to freak out and look at your case and solve the problem. It’s not an isolated incident, and I wish I could just say “fuck Amazon,” but being my first time publishing, I have no option here other than use Amazon or I’ll lose 95% of my sales. It’s unfortunate that I have to work with people who do this, but it’s just the reality for 99% of self-published authors.
They're both problems, the initial print and sending it back out. I don't see what's wrong with doing a test for the latter. "metaphorical bomb" sounds ridiculous to me. It's a metaphorical tracking beacon.
From the author's perspective, this is not expected according to their agreement with Amazon. Unfortunately from the consumer's perspective, this is not surprising at all. Everyone I know has received a "used" item sold as "new, sold by Amazon.com." Whether it's due to commingling, or an attempt to reduce waste, or plain corporate greed, I have no idea. Just saying that if I returned a book on Amazon, I wouldn't be surprised if it was soon sold to someone else, even if I was the author of the book.
It's blatantly illegal under federal law to sell used items as new, full stop, end of story. But Bezos gets invites to the white house pretty regularly so it seems federal regulators get the message that enforcement against Amazon is a no-go.
> Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed.
That statement jumped out at me too, but I'm not sure what to think about it. I also hate to say anything that might seem sympathetic to Amazon, a company I consider somewhat unethical.
These two statements below should be uncontroversial:
1. If Amazon prints a defective book and rejects it in QC then Amazon should get no revenue nor should the author. It should be recycled. Another copy should be printed and shipped and the revenue distributed as normal.
2. If Amazon prints a defective book and it is shipped returned due to defect then amazon should get no revenue nor should the author. It should be recycled. A new book should be printed and sent to the customer (assuming they didn't ask for a refund) and no payment to author / no extra revenue recognition to Amazon.
4. Amazon should not resell products returned that are defective.
The problem is: how should it know? They can't take the word of the customer returning the product. Amazon does resell high value returned items like TVs and monitors after checking them. But the cost of looking for the defect in the book is quite high -- I'd be surprised if it gets more than a casual glance/flip through.
I'm not sure what they should be doing in this case, but I do think the comment "This means I don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed" is a side distraction.
Amazon "checks" them hardly at all. I ordered a warehouse item (and I recognize this risk) for a Chicco stroller holder and received a Chicco box with a broken Gracco stroller in it.
That's not very checked. And there's not much I can do but return it (they don't even have a "you got scammed, idiots" option to tell them to check again).
Amazon shouldn't be in the business of printing books in first place, they are really bad at it. I recently received a copy printed by them (of an MIT press book), very low quality, similar as printed by a copy centre. Anyone on solid online book stores in Europe?
The contention, to me, is if returned or refurbished items are being labeled and sold as 'new', then Amazon may be running afoul of FTC truth-in-advertising laws.
If I go into a physical bookstore, buy a book, walk out with it, walk back in and return it still in good condition, should they not just put it back on the shelf? Would that be fraud? It's technically no longer "new" at that point.
True this was returned as "damaged" but how damaged was it? We aren't told and there are no photos.
The condition doesn't matter, either because of one of two scenarios.
1) This is the author, and these are rejected proofs or author copies. In which case, Amazon does not have the rights to sell them because they were not "returns".
2) This book has been sold once, and royalties have been paid, but it was returned, relabeled as "new" and sold again without a royalty being paid on that sale. The author and the customer have been cheated.
The thread has likely developed, but this is just going by my limited familiarity with publishing.
Recently Amazon has been sending me items that were clearly returned and poorly repackaged or damaged in the last year. This isn’t something I encountered or noticed prior to 2023.
Their screening policy for returned items may have changed.
It may be more common now, but I've had this problem with them before in the past. In one notable case I bought a new game console from Amazon.com and received a box that was so obviously used (seals broken, shrinkwrap missing, etc) that I didn't even bother opening it, I just returned it. Despite the price of the item they raised no objections, so they're probably used to this happening and just assume that most customers won't notice.
I purchased four used, like new smart plugs from Amazon Warehouse Deals a few days ago. Two were the wrong model in the right box and were very clearly used. One even had a scorch mark on it. I’ve had similar experiences with other Amazon purchases in the last few years.
I work in ecommerce, sometimes for a client where I get to work closely with the customer service people. I am familiar with what you get in returns from customers across a few different brands/verticals.
What amazes me is how good the returns can be. At one place, anything returned by the customer was as good as new. Out of a hundred returns, ninety nine of them were as good as what we sent out from the warehouse, absolutely mint. The correct product was in the box, pretty much guaranteed. We had a local stock room that was just from the returns and could get product for people from this stock of returned items.
Sometimes there could be a problem but we would catch this by just a quick check of the box.
There was a team of a dozen of us in the customer service. Had the business been bigger then I am sure that the one percent of actually defective stuff would get resold for people to get very vocal about it on social media.
Then other people would grumble too, to reminisce about the time their order was 'thrown over the hedge' by the delivery company driver.
Before you know it, the whole thing could snowball out of control. Also, at a larger scale, we would attract 'American' customers that don't respect the product in quite the same way as in the rest of the world where consumer culture and education is different.
I am no fan of Amazon but I do respect the efforts of the people they have doing the work there. For the consumer that has never worked a day in retail, it is not all about you!
Furthermore, we see what we expect to see. Getting back to working in retail, I was never shouted at or abused by customers. I set off in the morning looking forward to a fast paced day with lots of happy customers. That is what I expected and that is what I got.
I have met others that worked in retail to be perpetually abused. They expected a day of abuse and they got it.
I think the same applies with Amazon orders. If you expect to be delighted with your orders then you will be amazed at how excessively well packaged everything is and how miraculous the timely delivery is.
However, if you expect everything to be dinged, counterfeit and a repackaged return, then this is what you will get.
This exact thing happened to me and for weeks it would spontaneously cross my mind. I thought one of my kids did it yet I couldn't guess why, until one day it hit me: they were on vacation with their aunt when I received the books and found the toilet paper, and the book was slightly damaged when I got it. Then it dawned on me that someone had read this book before, likely while on their toilet.
For that and a few other reasons, I don't get books from Amazon anymore.
The way this is said makes it seem like they're expecting to be paid twice for two orders, one returned.
I assume what's being left implicit is that they're actually not paid for the 'KDP printing order' if it ends up returned? So then when someone else orders and receives that one and doesn't return it, there's a printed copy that was never paid out for?
Hm. I'm not logged in, and I only see 2 tweets, neither of which discuss royalties. What I'm seeing is only concerned with the poor customer experience of receiving damaged goods.
I feel like Amazon is so shady nowadays. I ordered a CD drive a while back just incase I needed it, and the brand/seller included a thing to get a gift card if leaving a review. I thought that was a little unethical, like a bribe so I mentioned in the review giving them like a 3 star if I remember. The next day Amazon disables my ability to leave reviews on that seller, and anytime I go review other sellers my reviews are held for review when they used to be instant from what I remembered, unless they changed it for everyone.
I guess I believe it's possible, but I've ordered hundreds of books off Amazon for going on 25 years now, and I've never not gotten books in the condition I paid for. It feels like it would be a weird and ineffective scam for them to pull, not exactly lucrative and pretty easy to get caught on. As I say, possible, but weird if true.
Based on the author's comment, I'm guessing these are print-on-demand books that were damaged during or right after the printing process, so if you are ordering non print-on-demand books your experience might not be as relevant
The realities of a warehouse operation make this inevitable (I’ve run an 8-figure/yr online distributor). Amazon cannot take the customer’s word on return condition. Folks just click “damaged” to get a refund and Amazon has to have warehouse workers, not professional book inspectors, receive the returns and note their condition.
This is good enough since someone buying the used copy can also return it if they disagree.
>Amazon cannot take the customer’s word on return condition.
Why not? Doing so prevents this exact scenario. I'm curious if you think this is appropriate in other circumstances too: a customer at the grocery store returns a bag of candy. Do you want the cashier to check it and decide to put it back on the shelf for you to buy?
>This is good enough since someone buying the used copy can also return it if they disagree.
But not good enough for the author, who loses a royalty payment.
This is almost exactly how it _does_ work in big box grocery except there are blanket policies re: disposal for food items. Fwiw, Amazon also has near identical policies for food items.
I've had a few outright duds with them, but mostly their product has been as expected.
EXCEPT, they ship mostly in plastic envelopes. And the items not infrequently get damaged during transit.
I have a set of "very good" Magnum PI DVD's that I expect shipped that way. But the DVD's weren't secured in their box. The season 4 plastic case slid far enough out of the boxed set to get dinged and broken. The internal DVD holder's mount is destroyed and the DVD's are just floating around in there.
I was stocking up on some older, "classic" CS titles, and I ordered several together (free shipping on orders over X dollars...). They arrived all crammed into one plastic envelope that looked like it had been dragged along for a while behind the delivery truck. (In reality, this is what the distribution center belts can do to an object, and a heavy package in a thin plastic envelope does not fare well.)
With just a thin, flexible plastic layer for protection, a number of corners on these "very good" books were bent and beat up. I've had covers arrive abraded. One title had one end of the binding crushed.
I still appreciate getting several titles I've wanted for way off cover price. But I wish they'd take a bit more care when shipping.
And, you never know what you're going to get. With them, I've taken to trying to order such that DVD's and Blu rays won't ship together with books (you can imagine what happens). But, when an item may not effectively ship for up to a week, this takes some schedule juggling and follow up. Plus, that used item may sell out in the meantime. And it also means sometimes foregoing the free shipping you get by clustering items.
I guess these are all first world problems, but it's frustrating. Plus, good condition items get trashed for the sake of lack of care / expediency in one step. Wasteful.
Hrm. I've never ordered anything from them beyond books. I'm at 58 books so far this year from them, and they've always arrived as I've ordered them. I've had a couple of books listed as new come in boxed packaging instead of the plastic envelope. Nothing ripped or crushed so far.
I wish they did ship a little faster. As it's usually 10-12 days from when I order it before I get it. Then again I'm usually getting free shipping and if I'm not I'm only paying $1.60 for media rate, which is a hell of a deal.
I've placed a number of orders with them, and many come through ok. But the shipping damage is often enough to be frustrating. I had one hard-to-get DVD arrive with the typical DVD plastic case shattered in one area into many pieces floating around the the plastic envelope. Fortunately, the DVD itself stayed in it's splayed fingers holder thingy, and it itself was still ok, image side sheltered by the remains of the case.
They also seem to have become less accurate/consistent in the last year or so, with their quality grading. I've gotten a few "good" or "acceptable" titles that looked very good or almost new, but also some "very good" titles with extensive writing, highlighting, or damage.
Perhaps ironically, I've started looking for the same title used on Amazon, and if the options are comparable, picking a highly rated seller there, instead.
This year, I intend to try looking at eBay, more. Not just for books. For some things, but certainly not others.
Care is required, but there are good sellers and often better prices than Bezosland. This impression is partially formed by more recent comments from others that I've read. So, I'm going to experiment and check that out.
P.S. Just the other day, I ordered a new book from Thriftbooks ( for reasons) and it arrived in that cut to size thin but stiff sticky on one side cardboard, when two pieces are slapped together around the book. That seems to work rather well, and the title, a paperback, arrived in perfect shape.
It shipped from a Texas location, and I seem to recall one or two other books from them that were also shipped that way. And that at least one of those also came from a Texas location of theirs.
They also ship books in oversized boxes with no padding. If you're "lucky", they combined your book order with your order for something hard and heavy that can help beat the book up while the box tumbles.
Not always, but often enough that if I order a book from them, I try to remind myself to to wait to order until nothing else I've ordered has yet to ship. Then wait after I've ordered the book, until the book has shipped, before I order anything else.
I don't order that much from Amazon, but my orders often "cluster". For a recent example, the Christmas holidays. I got a beat up book cover because they upped the delivery date of the book by about a week (newish best seller), while in the meantime I'd ordered a heavy object that always ships the next day and that I didn't want to wait a week plus for. So, jacketed hardcover arrives loose in the oversized space next to big, heavy, sharp edged object, with no padding whatsoever inside the box.
I guess if I'd returned that book, it simply would have gone -- damaged -- to someone else.
They do this with hard drives as well. The first and last time I ever purchased hard drives from Amazon, the two drives arrived in an oversized box with no protection other than the antistatic bags they were in. I sent them back but I'm sure they'll just sell them to someone else.
Most of the time my Amazon books have arrived in good condition mostly due to sheer luck given the way they were packed. Sometimes a hardcover had a dented corner or a paperback had a bent spine. Not worth the hassle of returning and reordering (especially if the price went up since ordering as Amazon refuses to honor the original price). I do miss Book Depository as they would ship each book individually even when I ordered multiple items.
These days I try to avoid Amazon but keep getting sucked in when the price + shipping is cheaper or I can't be bothered creating an account on a website I have not used before.
Unfortunately even ordering the book on its own isn't a sure-fire way to get it well-packaged. The last several books I've bought were shipped in a thin paper bag (or a bubble mailer if I was lucky.)
As someone who takes care of their stuff, it's pretty annoying to get my books pre-worn.
It didn’t used to be this way. Books would ship in a tight fitting corrugated cardboard package that would protect them. I suspect it was some kind of custom packing machine that would fold and cut to size.
Now it’s either in a padded envelope - still space for the book to move around - or it’s in a box with whatever else.
Creased covers, ragged corners, torn dust jackets… It’s awful if you want to give a book as a gift.
Ironically books are the one thing I don't buy on Amazon. eBay has a much better experience, easily 9 times out of 10 I'm confident I'm buying the book in the picture, and usually there are several pictures of the exact condition.
I’ve never personally bought a book from Amazon but my wife has a few times and each time she’s returned it saying it looked beat up. I figured she was just being picky (very on brand) but perhaps she was onto something.
> From: Joaquín Baldwin, @joabaldwin
> Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book
> is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I
> don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed. They
> stole my money while scamming a customer.
So the author wants to be paid royalties on books he says are "damaged" that are brand new but that he says can not be sold to customers?
We recently discussed abuses of copyright law. This qualifies as an abuse of copyright law IMHO.
That depends on whether he got paid for the first printing of the damaged, returned book, which I don’t think he was. He mentioned in a comment that he got 50 author copies, checked them, and returned the damaged ones. I assume he was not paid for the free author copies..?
So if they sold a returned author copy that is known to be damaged then Amazon 1) failed to pay him for a sold book, and 2) broke some kind of rule in their contract where it promises to sell high-quality prints of his book to his readers. Sure, QA is not perfect and problems will happen, but selling a book that is known to be damaged does not count as an honest mistake.
My understanding is that Amazon is not accounting for the royalties after they are returned from an author purchase and resold under terms other than the royalty free terms.
It's not that he wants to get paid for the unsold inventory, it's that he believes he doesn't get paid at all when they resell as new the used inventory he rejected and returned in quality control of his royalty free author purchase.
I have returned a book to Amazon. Poorly printed, blurry text, unreadable. Low quality cover print. What other choice is there but to return it? You can't let them get away with sending out rubbish.
If the book was print-on-demand, nobody at Amazon ever saw or touched the book. And Amazon is not running recurring audits, not even for initial shipments, on those small external partners. What happens, is that as soon as too many concessions are triggered (refubds or replacements), the partner gets warned or shut down (depending on the clout the partners Amazon contacts have, well, politics do happen...). Or, if the partner is big and important enough, people like me at the time, whom are operationally responsible for that partner, get the assigent to straighten things out togwther with retail.
With millions of customers every day so, the number of fuck ups is high in absolute numbers. It is, at least as far as I ever saw, minuscule in relation to the overall volume handled. Much lower, I might add, than anything I ahve ever seen in aerospace manufacturing for example.
I just finished returning 15+ books, I purchased the wheel of time series but every single one had a stupid "now an Amazon prime series" badge on the front cover that was not pictured in the display image and they look awful with it.
I received 2 extremely bad books, same press, illegible. Maybe print-on-demand, not sure. Complained, got a refund. Was told not to bother returning the books.
I have an acquaintance with this elitist, pseudo-ethical rich guy syndrome where he refuses to ever return things because some buyer or some investor somewhere might lose money. So, either he lacks standards or doesn't value money. Either way, this attitude facilitates both gamification of chicanery and shoddiness by laziness to reach peak blank, miscut books and Xboxes swapped with bricks and concrete.
In her case, she ordered author copies (that gives you no royalties, of course) and got the same copies sold again to herself as author copies.
In my case, I also ordered author copies, but they were resold to a normal customer after I returned them.
From an order of 50 author copies, I returned 14. Packaging was fine, so it wasn’t a problem with how they bumped up during shipping. They were misprinted, or had folded covers (they tear easily after a fold, really bad), some were printed beyond the bleed area (that’s what bleed is for, you can’t be printing beyond it), and a few were printed slightly off angle. One particularly bad copy was even cut an inch smaller than it should’ve been, trimming every single page and cover, text and all.
So yeah, that’s why I returned them. But I do give you that some of those defects would go completely unseen by someone at a warehouse. You flip through the book, all pages seem to be there, but how is a person there supposed to know what the margins of the book look like? But most errors would not pass a regular printing press QC, particularly the damaged covers.
Also, Amazon both prints and distributes these books, so QC is in their hands from the start.