Bookjacking Level II
Related Article: ... NEVER Purchase From Bookjackers
Dear Readers,
I spend about 35 hours a week pricing our incoming books by using Abe.com and Amazon.com. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a very strange trend. For almost EVERY modern book that I handle (which mostly happen to be books published by scholarly and university presses), not only does Amazon display a record that contains an ISBN (which I will refer to as a LEGITIMATE record), but also several identical records that do NOT contain ISBNs (which I will refer to as ILLEGITIMATE records).
Professional sellers on Amazon, (like Zubal Books), have the ability to create product ID pages for titles that Amazon currently does not have in its catalog. More times than not, these are foreign titles or titles that were published prior to the ISBN standard (which happened around 1969/70). However, if we try to create a page for a book that already exists in the Amazon catalog, the page creation system catches this and tells us to list the book under the existing page (which makes perfect sense).
The questions then are, why and how are there so many duplicate pages created for modern ISBN books on Amazon? One answer is that if a “seller” purposely provides bad information during the creation phase, the Amazon system will not notice that a page already exists for the title and a new page will be created that does not include an ISBN in the Amazon ASIN field. Then, when a customer searches for the author & title, this illegitimate page is shown alongside the existing legitimate page.
This redundancy of book pages on Amazon seems to have taken off sometime in the last 3 years. Prior to that, if you did a search for a modern title, you would ONLY be shown the legitimate page. So, after 3 years of dealing with this redundancy and confusion on the Amazon marketplace on a daily basis, I began to email Amazon seller support with links of the illegitimate pages and asked them to merge the illegitimate pages onto the legitimate page. They were happy to do this for me and, at least for a few titles that we were listing, the illegitimate pages were removed.
Recently, I was doing some online reading about bookjacking (a.k.a. “spidering” ) and came across
this article:
Daily
Deals, formerly DailyDeal USA: Meet A Spider
As I was reading the comments at the bottom of the article (all the way up to the most current), I noticed that several people said that Amazon will do nothing about bookjackers because Amazon benefits TWICE whenever a bookjacked book is sold. Often times the bookjacking occurs from a listing on Abebooks (which AMAZON owns (!!!!!), so when the bookjacker gets a sale on Amazon (commission #1), they have to buy it on Abebooks (commission #2), hence 2 commissions for Amazon on one sale.
This little fact finally opened my mind to why all the duplicate listings on Amazon for modern books and why Amazon does nothing about it. As you will see when you click on the links I’m providing, the illegitimate listings are always more expensive than the legitimate listing (sometimes by 10X or greater!), so the hope is that the illegitimate listing gets sold (commission #1), and then to fulfill the order, legitimate listing gets sold (commission #2).
Whenever I emailed Amazon about these duplicate listings, I state:
Please merge or delete the following pages:
(links provided)
Whenever I emailed Amazon about these duplicate listings, I state:
They duplicate the following LEGITIMATE page:
(links provided)
These pages never should have been allowed to have been made. They were created using PURPOSELY BAD INFORMATION (DATES, TITLES, ETC..) TO OUTSMART THE AMAZON PAGE CREATION SYSTEM. There is a finite number of "sellers" who are apparently creating tens of thousands of these types of duplicate pages for which there already exist legitimate pages with isbns. Please merge ALL Pages that these sellers list on that do NOT have legitimate ISBNS. The sellers are:
AGAPAO
AMOR DEI
Aprilbookstore
Arthurbooks
BooK Kings
Book-bosomed store
bookbazaars
BooksRunner
croresbooks
Deam Readers
Deep Ocean Store
EasyGlobalBuying
ebsydney
Epapirus
Faithfulness Books
FaithfulServantJP
findbook2004
Full Harvest
G-gate
GlobalStore US
GNMart USA
GoldVictory
Goodmanspaper
grago books
Greenlife Store
hiroshimakber
Histore
hkstrength
Hope's Fire Online
jason_kurt
JB World Books
jemiles
Josephstore
KALANEE
KingDom Fish
KRerbooks
Lambelë
linkearth
Lionkingbooks
melisasandy
mercado_b
MollieBooks
Nakoop Books
Oasis1270
Onlinebookshop
oz24shop
Pacific Island
PublixBooks
ReachTheGoal
RippleBooks
SA James Books
sev4store
ShopperDooper
Silver Ocean
SimonBooks
Sophia Bookstore
Team Player (Customer-Focused)
TheShineStore
tienda online USA
Vitapippi
VizKStore
Voltado
wakullabooks
Wisdom Castle
Wisper Books
Xian's Store
oz24shop
AMAZON REALLY NEEDS TO ENFORCE ITS POLICY REGARDING CREATING PRODUCT ID PAGES FOR WHICH THERE ARE ALREADY LEGITIMATE PAGES (PAGES WITH REAL ISBNS) EXISTING ON AMAZON
I have contacted seller performance repeatedly on this issue and have "reported a violation" several times, but AMAZON CHOOSES TO NOT ADDRESS THIS ISSUE.
The "sellers" creating these pages are purposely monopolizing display space on Amazon and diverting customers away from the LEGITIMATE (isbn) publisher pages for these titles. This is probably ILLEGAL.
Please do something productive about this problem or redirect my inquiry to a senior team member that actually can help.
Thank you.
Tom Zubal
Hence, the fact that Amazon chooses to do nothing about this problem leads me to the conclusion that it is Amazon itself that has created these illegitimate records in order to increase profits. It would be no trouble at all for them to easily remove the illegitimate records (in spite of the fact that there are probably millions of such records) based on the information with which I’ve provided them.
Also, all of the above “sellers” that I’ve listed are not “real” booksellers - meaning they have no physical presence in the world. Furthermore, those “sellers” NEVER list on legitimate pages.
Is it possible that Amazon is knowingly allowing customers to be diverted from the legitimate publisher’s page in order to “double dip” on commissions?
Product placement goes a long way in selling an item, hence, when the customer is bombarded with these illegitimate pages, I’m sure a percentage end up purchasing from these illegitimate pages simply because they can’t find the legitimate page. (VICTORY for Amazon!).
Examples by publisher:
Springer
18 Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics (Paperback)
"Functional Coherence of Molecular Networks in Bioinformatics"
"Batteries for Implantable Biomedical Devices"
"Multimedia Interface Design in Education"
Princeton
Cambridge
"Classical and Quantum Orthogonal Polynomials in One Variable"
"Sound Transmission through a Fluctuating Ocean"
"Films of Ingmar Bergman kalin"
"The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers"
"Possible Worlds in Literary Theory"
"Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology"
"The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture"
"Letters of Lucien to Camille Pissarro, 1883-1903"
Dover
"Aerodynamics of wings and bodies"
Routledge
"Speculations After Freud: Psychoanalysis"
"Returns of the "French Freud:" Freud, Lacan, and Beyond"
"The Europa World of Learning 2015"
"Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities"
"Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation"
"Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology"
"Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming"
"This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams"
"Jung, Irigaray, Individuation: Philosophy,"
"Nietzsche and Jung: The Whole Self in the Union"
"Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze"
"Jung in the 21st Century Volume"
"Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis"
"Jung in the 21st Century Volume One: Evolution"
"C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation"
"Feminist Poetics: Performance, Histories"
Chicago
"Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle"
"Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida"
"Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason theory"
"Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, : A Poststructuralist Mapping of History"
"Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit"
MIT
"Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through"
"New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians"
"On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction"
blackwell
"adkins Feminism After Bourdieu"
"Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity"
"The Doctrine of God: A Global Introduction"
"Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates"
"The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics"
Oxford
"Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism"
"Insight and Psychosis: Awareness of Illness in Schizophrenia"
"Goodwin and Guze's Psychiatric Diagnosis"
"Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth"
"Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A"
edinburgh
"Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation"
"The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas"
harvard
"Wing of Madness: The Life and Work"
sage
"Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory"
"Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse"
suny
"Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis" chapelle"
"Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies"
"Living and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern"
psychology press
"Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive"
Scholars Press
"The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland:"
Yale
"Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition"
guilford
"Logics of Dislocation: Models, Metaphors, and"
columbia
"Emmanuel Levinas" : "Entre Nous"
"Rise and Fall of Soul and Self"
U of Minnesota
"Foucault And Heidegger: Critical Encounters"
U of Toronto
"Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege"
The list can literally go on and on. These samples were taken from a small collection of books that I worked over the course of 2 hours one morning.
I think the best course of action is to get the word out. Marketplace manipulation should be eliminated when discovered. Feel free to email us with your thoughts on Bookjacking Level II, we’d love to hear from you. And, you might as well email Amazon about it. Perhaps if enough people speak up, Amazon will realize that cleaning up the duplicate listings is the right thing to do.