There are a number of reasons why I broke my Amazon addiction. I used to sell on marketplace and over the two years I was there Amazon raised the percentage they took from each sale, they added an additional straight fee charged to each seller on Amazon Marketplace, and they mandated that all sellers provide invoices for the goods they sold, something easier for large sellers than small sellers selling used items often bought many years before like myself. To top it off Amazon even refused to accept their own invoices for items I had bought from Amazon years earlier and was reselling on Amazon Marketplace.
The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, however, was a Russian classic. Earlier this year I purchased the Alma Classics translation of Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time from Amazon. When I got this item through the mail, however, there was a clearly noticeable weirdness about the book. First off, it was larger than the typical Alma Classic. Second, there was no title page. Nor was there a table of contents page. The chapter list was right above the beginning of the book on the very first page of the novel. Third, on the last page of the book I found a barcode (3797508R00049) and a statement notifying me that the item was "[p]rinted in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment Poland Sp. z.o.o Wroclaw.
It took me awhile but with the aid of the publisher I discovered that Amazon had sold me a pirated edition of their book and had even blocked the Alma Classic of A Hero of Our Time from Amazon's website preferring, apparently, to sell the pirated version of the book rather than the book as published by Alma, the original publisher. The book Amazon sold me as the Alma Classic of A Hero of Our Time translated by Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell is not the Parker and Cornwell translation of A Hero Our Time. In fact, there is absolutely no information about who the translator or translators of this pirated edition are, though it is clear it is neither Parker or Parker/Cornwell. According to the electronic version (which can be found here) this reprint is an adaptation of the Parker translation (which was originally done for the Soviet Foreign Language Publishing House) that Americanises the text and corrects, or so the unknown translators claim, the translation though who the translators are ("we have") is unclear. Additionally, the translators claim that the Everyman version, an earlier revision of the Parker translation by Cornwell, was not copyrighted, an assertion one might find questionable given the evidence of the Alma edition and revision of the Parker translation. What is not questionable is that Amazon is selling a cover copyrighted by Alma and this is not only a questionable practise but likely a violation of copyright. By the way, the Amazon faux version has some excellent notes presumably by the anonymous translators.
I had read in The Atlantic, Forbes, and in the New York Times that Amazon sold pirated goods. This was the first time, however, I had ever seen one in the proverbial flesh. I immediately wrote a review of the item on Amazon noting that the version of Alma's A Hero of Our Times Amazon was offering for sale was a fake. Then I contacted Amazon to tell them about the scam. When I did this, however, I discovered that the scammer was not some Eastern European scam artist but was Amazon itself. Amazon's poorly paid chat clerks denied that I bought the book from them--something the empirical evidence noted above shows is a lie--and they refused to explore the issue further. Once again I was reintroduced to that well known and well worn phrase caveat emptor, a phrase I was quite cognizant of thanks to buying items from Amazon Marketplace where descriptions of books for sale are often misleading at best and which Amazon does nothing about thereby allowing flim flam con sellers to fleece consumers again and again.
Given Amazon's intransigence and its elimination of evidence that showed that customers were sold a pirated version of a Russian classic I immediately cancelled any preorders from Amazon including the Beatles deluxe edition of Abbey Road and I began searching for alternatives which, compared to Amazon, are ethical and moral giants (something not very hard to do). I began buying books from Blackwell, an old brick and mortar store, and highly recommend buying books from Blackwell. I bought Abbey Road and other items I originally intended to buy from Amazon from Walmart, a corporation that, compared to Amazon, is akin to Perceval. I started buying classical CD's from HBDirect and Presto Classica and can recommend both to potential customers. Additionally, I still have the pirated A Hero of Our Time with its Amazon Fulfillment statement in the back of the book and I intend to present this data to the New York State Attorney General. Amazon, it really hasn't been nice getting to know what a slag and skank ye truly are.
Speaking of Skankazon, I recently discovered that Amazon also sold me three other Alma Classics (Bunin's Dark Avenues, Chekhov's The Woman in the Case, and Turgenev's Faust) that are Amazon reprints (printed in Delaware) rather than the Alma Classics themselves. I assume Skankazon makes more monies off of these fake books--they are printed by the Amazon owned CreateSpace--and this is the reason they sell reprints like these. I would, by the way, return all of them if I could-- I was only able to return Faust (which they sent with a different cover than advertised on their site)-- because first, I ordered the Alma Classic not the Amazon knockoff, and second, I don't trust Skankazon. I will thus only be buying Alma's from Powell's or Blackwell's in the future.
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