Postmortem: Someone Cloned My Book on Amazon
On January 20th, 2017, Angular 2 Cookbook - a text I had been working on for nearly a year - was published and available on Amazon.
Within a few months, someone had stolen the contents, formatted it into a new book, printed copies, and listed them on Amazon — under the same URL as the actual book.
The Theft
It’s no secret that if you don’t want to pay for a book, it’s relatively simple not to. The speed at which an ebook is converted to a PDF and listed on a torrent site is comparable to an L1 cache hit.
This is the reality of book publishing, and despite this grim reality, technical book sales are still quite good. I would imagine that, in the world of software, the ROI of a good technical book is quite high, so developers are happy to pay. I can see my books on torrent sites: it’s expected, and it doesn’t bother me.
What actually happened was not expected at all. Sometime in April 2017, I saw a separate listing for the print book appear on the same Amazon page:
Instead of “2 formats”, the listing showed 3; a Kindle format, a print version published January 20th (the real one), and a print version published in April (the fake one).
The Fake Listing
The fake listing appeared to be legitimate — after all, how could a fake book be listed under the same URL as the real one?
The cover image looked slightly distorted, but that’s not really proof of anything. The fake listing still had the same star rating and reviews attributed to it, so it appeared to be the same book. The fake book was also listed for $5 cheaper than the real copy.
Amazon authors have access to a portal that allows us to see some sales metrics, and also claim ownership of our books so we can manage and update the book description. What ended up fooling me was that I was able to take ownership of the fake edition of the book and update its description.
The fake book had different sales metrics, which I thought was strange, but it’s important to realize that technical authors have very little insight into what happens with the book after we send it to be printed. I get royalty statements and sales numbers very infrequently, and there would be no real way of knowing if a book listing was just an updated version submitted by the publisher.
The Reveal
On June 2, I got a particularly negative book review. It’s never fun to have your work criticized, but reading this one, it made no sense to me:
I pulled my personal copy of the book off the shelf, and sure enough, there were definitely page numbers and a correct table of contents.
I added these images to a response review, and soon after, the reviewer uploaded images of their own book:
What?
The Unsatisfying Conclusion
I immediately reached out to Packt Publishing to ask about the matter, as clearly there was something afoot. They got back to me soon after, saying that the second version was a hoax, and that it had been taken down. Following this, I contacted the reviewer to explain the situation, and they took their review down as well.
Yet questions remain. How does something like this happen? How many books on Amazon have been crappily cloned and listed in a way that appears completely legitimate? Who is able to penetrate Amazon in such a way?
Packt claims that the onus of responsibility for preventing such fraud lies with Amazon, and I believe them. The impact on this book is minimal, but I can only imagine the scope of this problem across an entity as large as Amazon.
