What is this? More money laundering through Amazon?
In the wake of the money-laundering discovered on Amazon by author Patrick Reames, it’s clear that Amazon has a problem.
I’m not certain it’s only with ebooks. I’ve discovered strangeness with high dollar amounts that suggest the possibility of criminal activity, and the fact that some of the books that are — compromised, for lack of a better word — are books I’ve written, suggests that this issue could have a pretty wide spread.
Today I went in to connect an indie paperback to an indie e-book, and in the process discovered that a lot of books I’d written were being sold for phenomenal amounts of money.
(All images below link to full-sized screenshots so you can see ISBNs and other details.)
Here’s how I found these problem books:
Author Central, where you find books that MIGHT be yours
I was in Amazon’s Author Central doing work on an upcoming release, and discovered that there were a number of new buttons for books I’d written years ago, for which there were no legitimate reprints or authorized new editions.
In some instances, they duplicate the Amazon page, but use the new ISBN, which Amazon does not allow. Sometimes, but not always, they show up in searches for legitimate sellers.
In others, they create a new user name that includes the author’s name.
I’ve found several different kinds of creepy strangeness here that are worrisome.
On the first image below, this is a duplicate of the legitimate Amazon page with an alternate ISBN. This book is still in print, by the way, and while the new price is insanely high, the used price (visible on the full-sized image if you click the small one, is almost double.
In-Print book with dummied page
Below is an independent republication of a book for which rights reverted to me, published through CreateSpace, so this problem is NOT limited to just commercially published books or commercial publishers.
Create Space version of book with unreasonable price
The next image is simply a reseller page, but again, look at the prices. These are not books out of print. These are books that are in print by the publisher and still available in brand-new print versions for about twenty bucks. Yet the prices on these are for $1949.78 for new, and $713.52 for used. They’re not rare, they’re not autographed, they’re not collectible.
Different Version, not dummied page
Next is the page for Hawkspar, which shows a used version of the hardcover for $8.75, the Kindle version for $7.99 from Tor, the paperback for $23.88 from Tor, and then the paperback version from some third party for $2,839.88.
The two legitimate versions, and the crook’s version
This is the book that actually tipped me off to the problem, actually. This one has a different ISBN number than the legitimate seller’s book, duplicates the page, and is the one I actually talked to the Amazon representative about.
Price on that version
And the last two. These use AISNs rather than ISBNs, and are clearly reseller books. They aren’t trying to look like publishers, but the prices for paperbacks that probably sold in schools for about ten bucks are pretty insane.
Another “laundering-priced” book
So what I’m coming away from here is an impression of Amazon being used for large-scale criminal activity of some sort. That’s not an impression any business wants to give.
And another
Why do I say “large-scale criminal activity?” I’m one author. This many of the books I’ve written have something obviously wrong and illegitimate going on with them.
Does it affect me? I don’t think it hits me financially. I cannot imagine anyone who even loved my work a lot paying that much. So my readers won’t get hurt. They aren’t my listings, so the sellers can’t say I got paid for the sales.
But something in wrong here, and here’s how this DOES affect me. With the money laundering issue caught above, and then discovering books with my name on them that have something bad going on with them, it does make me less comfortable about using Amazon, either as a writer or as a customer — and I’ve done both for a long time.
At bare minimum, this is a problem of perception: Amazon looks bad for having these books on its site.
If you’re an author, either commercial, indie, or mixed, I’d very much like to hear if you’ve found works of your own being used in this fashion. I’d like to know wide this problem has spread. Post whatever you find below.
