John C. Boland was looking at books at the bookstore when he saw a science fiction novel for sale. Sandy Dunes Surplus, Rocky Mountain Books, and Open Range Media all contributed to it.
He did not need a copy. He published the novel himself. The list price is fifteen dollars.
Mr. Boland has been selling books on Amazon. The bookseller handles everything for the Perfect Crime imprint.
He calls it the best retailer on the planet. They eat the lunch.
Mr. Boland sued Amazon at the end of August, accusing the retailer of eating Perfect Crime's lunch. Sandy Dunes and other vendors were allowed to run wild with Perfect Crime titles on Amazon. The sellers claimed that "Hominid" was published in 1602 and that it was 409 years before it was actually issued.
The suit in federal court in Maryland shows a glimpse into Amazon's dominance. Walmart has been overtaken by Amazon as the largest retailer outside of China. It helped many people navigate a bleak moment by delivering essentials and luxuries to those stuck at home. Shipping times used to be measured in days. It is one of the most valuable companies.
Amazon is under a lot of pressure.
There are sellers who say they are suffering from the Wild West atmosphere on the site, as well as regulators who are taking a closer look at Amazon's power, unhappy warehouse employees who would like a better deal, and lawmakers who want Amazon to disclose more about its third. Amazon says it is having a hard time getting rid of the devious sellers.
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The author John C. Boland has sued Amazon for not policing the sale of his books on the site.
All of these groups could be dealt with. There is a bigger risk with customers. Jeff Bezos once said that customers aredivinely discontented. They were not fond of Amazon last quarter. Its e- commerce revenue barely budged after years of growth.
Maybe it was a blip. Maybe shoppers are frustrated.
Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant, said that Amazon started as a bookstore, but is now a marketplace. Over time, the shopping experience has gotten worse.
The bookstore is still central to the identity of Amazon, but it is no longer its bottom line. It feels like every Amazon shopping experience is going to be like this, with ads and unvetted reviews, and third-party sellers whose identities can't be revealed.
In court, Amazon denied all of Mr. Boland's allegations. The consumer experience has not gotten worse. The bookstore's less traveled aisles are like a neighborhood left by the authorities to fend for itself.
The sheer size and complexity of Amazon is a political issue. The Department of Justice sued to stop the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House. The combined firm would have a large share of the market for new books. Amazon has more control over the sale. It has as much as two-thirds of the market for new and used books through its own platform and subsidiaries.
The author of "Antitrust: Examples & Explanations" asked if we should care that a single firm controls half of our most precious cultural commodity and its automation isn't working right.
His book was the top seller on Amazon in the category of antitrust law. The second-ranked seller was a mental health book. The book was about the beginnings of Christmas. No. 15 was about child murders. There was no correlation between the top 20 books and antitrust.
Mr. Sagers said that people think Amazon's algorithms are better than they are.
Amazon wouldn't say how much of its book sales are done through third parties. It is over half for the entire marketplace. The majority of these are legitimate. Some are not. The lawsuit suggests that Amazon doesn't make much effort to distinguish between the two. It seems that the customer is responsible for that.
Juozas Kaziukenas, an e- commerce consultant, said that Amazon doesn't really want to be a retailer. Retail has two essential qualities that it doesn't want to do.
Offering hundreds of millions of items to hundreds of millions of customers prevents any human touch, but opens up a lot of space for advertising and confusion. It might be a good thing for Amazon's competitors in physical bookstores, who have a smaller and more tightly controlled stock. It doesn't bode well for e- commerce.
The more things there are to buy, the harder it is to find the right one.
Mr. Kaziukenas said that Amazon knows what he buys, how often he buys, and what he searches for. It can't answer a simple question, what would Juozas like to buy? It shows me thousands of deals, with some basic filters, and hopes I will find something I like. Amazon is a lot of work.
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Max Guther has credit.
When the dot-coms were around, the Amazon bookstore was a simple place. It had knowledgeable human editors and was fast. For the book-obsessed, it offered every publisher's backlist, obscure but irresistible titles that had previously been difficult to discover and acquire.
It was a sensation to have all those things in one place. Independent stores and chains lost market share to Amazon.
Online shopping promised a lot. Time magazine praised the site for being "alive with uncounted species of insight, innovation and intelligence." Mr. Bezos was named Person of the Year by the magazine in 1999.
Third-party sellers were an Amazon innovation. Flea markets and stores that had a lot of sellers under one roof were called flea markets and were not quite reliable.
The brisk competition of the latter was offered by Amazon. Amazon brought in third-party sellers in order to promote how it was helping small businesses, which helped diffuse the controversy around its size and behavior.
The Institute for Local Self- Reliance, a research and advocacy group that is critical of Amazon, has just released a report detailing the most direct benefit of third-party sellers to the retailer. The institute calculates that a third-party seller pays Amazon more in sales than it did a year ago.
Premium logistics, fees and ads make the merchandise more visible to potential buyers. The report was misleading because the site does not force sellers to use its system.
The author of a report on Amazon's Toll Road: How the Tech Giant Funds Its Monopoly Empire by Exploiting Small Businesses said that bookselling at Amazon is a two-tier system.
Ms. Mitchell said that most of the books that you might find at a local bookstore are sold by Amazon. Third-party sellers take a huge cut of their sales when Amazon lets them do the rest of the books.
She said that Amazon doesn't care if the third-party stuff is chaotic. If legitimate businesses don't stand a chance, it's better for Amazon. Amazon wants to turn all work into gig jobs, the same way it wants to turn running a business into a gig job. It can walk off with all the spoils.
The chaos was found by Mr. Boland, a retired journalist. He wrote and published things that were from 1876 to 1842.
He said it was deceptive advertising. Why is Amazon the champion of consumers?
The backdating of titles to gain a commercial edge appears to be a new phenomenon, but the prices for ordinary books have been an Amazon mystery for years. A listing with a fake date on Amazon will have a different page than a listing with the correct date. The books were in another aisle of the bookstore. That could get people to buy.
A search on the site for paperbacks published before 1800 yielded over 100,000 results. A seller is charging $45 for a book that was published in 1725. It sells for 25 cents elsewhere in the bookstore.
Amazon said that they do not allow the activity Mr. Boland observed and are working to correct it. There is no evidence that any of the books were counterfeit, as only a small number of them were sold by third-party sellers in our store. How this happened is being investigated.
The misuse of Mr. Boland's name is something he takes personally. He said that if a seller claims to have a 1602 edition that is almost $1,000, it is defaming him by implying that he is a plagiarist.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects Amazon from being sued over posts by their users, even if the product is a physical item, according to court papers.
The director of the program said the company was probably correct. He said that Amazon would not be liable for misstatements posted by others if it wasn't aware of them.
Mr. Boland said that he made Amazon aware of the problem last spring, but got nowhere. After his suit was filed, Amazon began pulling the incorrect listings down. Amazon said in a filing that Perfect Crime's damages are vague, uncertain, imaginary and speculative.
Mr. Boland is suspicious that the backdating sellers named in the suit are connected. Sandy Dunes, Open Range, and Rocky Mountain all seem to have changed their names.
Mr. Bezos celebrated the fact that Amazon had two million independent sellers. He wrote that third-party sellers were kicking the first party butt. The company said they pulled in $90,000 a year.
It is possible for a third party to make more money with a little fraud.
In the Western District of Michigan, the U.S. attorney's office recently announced arrests in a case involving Amazon's textbook rental program. The charges against Talsma were that he sold his rentals of " Using Econometrics: A Practical Guide," "Chemistry: Atoms First" and other volumes instead of returning them.
The customer is king at Amazon. Mr. Talsma made a lot of money by saying he had received the wrong products. He said that he had mistakenly shipped products that could not be returned, like a bottle of Tiki Torch Fuel. Amazon would credit his account.
The scale, length and profitability of this activity is remarkable. Customers can rent up to 15 textbooks at a time. Prosecutors say that Mr. Talsma made over three million dollars by renting more than 15,000 textbooks from Amazon. His lawyer didn't say anything.
Mr. Boland said that Amazon has done a great job of expanding the marketplace for books. It is too bad they decided not to police their own platform, because it is leading to all sorts of trouble.
Some third-party sellers bring problems, including fraud. The retailer says it has invested $700 million to fight these issues.
The resources are not enough. In a policy paper published in October, Amazon said that authorities needed to make changes to protect the integrity of e- commerce.
Amazon has resisted requiring more information from its sellers. It said that it would violate sellers' privacy. Recently it signaled guarded approval of a weaker bill, but noted that there were a few parts that could be refined.
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Dave Grohl's book, "The Storyteller," became a best seller on Amazon.
Amazon gives writers and publishers the ability to sell anything. The good work will rise and the bad will fall according to the logic of the store. Some readers get suckered.
Dave Grohl is the drummer for the Foo Fighters. The University Press, which is not a university press, paid Amazon to promote the book, which is called Dave Grohl: The Biography.
Like many of the books on Amazon, "The Biography" is written in a language other than English. A typical sentence reads, "It is obvious that he has been instrumental in his own success."
It sold. The Biography is now promoted as the best seller, just like Mr. Grohl's book. Amazon says that "The Biography" is the top New Age Music.
Someone who is under the impression the musician himself wrote the comment on the top critical review of The Biography is upset. The reviewer wrote thatGrohl should stick to writing. Other buyers were angry that they had been tricked into buying a pamphlet. Adding to the confusion, Mr. Grohl's book was described as a holiday toy list.
Some of the pamphlets are written in Almost English. One pamphlet said it offered an explanation of the indirect and figurative statements made by the writer.
Time magazine has a swell future of insight and intelligence.
It doesn't seem like anyone at Amazon is saying: "We're junking the store up." Ms. Friedman said that they had to decide what was best for the customer.
When the algorithms act, they do so bluntly.
Amazon began dropping books with the name "Redskins" in them after the team changed their name. The book "Fight for Old DC: George Preston Marshall, the Integration of the Washington Redskins, and the Rise of a New NFL" was no longer available. George MacDonald Fraser's historical caper "Flashman and the Redskins" did the same.
Amazon didn't intend to ban these books. It didn't know it had done so until a reporter told the retailer. The titles were restored after it called the deletions a mistake.
It is hard to get Amazon to acknowledge a mistake because it is hard to get a human to fix it. Valancourt Books, a publisher that has won praise for its re-releases of horror and gay interest titles, frequently runs afoul of the site.
The publisher of Valancourt said that they will remove something but not tell you why. A recent case involved a new edition of a novel by a midcentury English horror novelist. It was called a "splendid ghoulish read" by The Sunday Times of London.
Amazon didn't think much of it.
The subject matter of your book is not in line with our guidelines. We can't offer this book for sale.
We have to guess what offended the computer. How hard do you want to fight when it is one book? Most of the e-books come from Amazon. A lot of sales you don't have if they block a title.
Julia Lee, an Amazon spokeswoman, said, "Our review process is a combination of machine learning, automation and a large dedicated team of human reviewers and sometimes, as in this case, we see human error." She wouldn't say what the error was.
Amazon is having a negative effect on Valancourt. The publisher brought out an edition of a Victorian story called "Carmilla" that has become important in queer studies. There are many less ambitious versions of the same thing.
Customers complain to us that they can't find our edition, or that they thought they were ordering ours but got some junk edition instead," Mr. Jenkins said.
There are at least 20 editions of Carmilla on Amazon. The Valancourt edition is difficult to find on the site, with 1,206 reviews, some of which are clearly talking about inferior editions. One reviewer complained in Almost English that the book didn't include a forward. The introduction to the Valancourt book is here.
The story comes full circle. In 1999 Amazon gave devoted readers a gift that was great: to make every book in print available within a few days. There is a maze of debris at the site. Valancourt has given up.
The scholarly editions of 18th- and 19th-century texts have largely stopped being produced.
The good is being driven out by the bad.
Danny Caine, the proprietor of a bookstore in Lawrence, Kan., wrote a letter to Mr. Bezos saying that his book business had diminished the book itself. Mr. Caine is writing a book, which he said was bad about Amazon.
A software program sprang into action after seeing the confluence of bad and good.
Amazon apologized for the experience, but they missed the point. Without providing any account or personal details, can you give us more insight on the issue you have encountered? Let us know. We are here to help.
