Amazon slammed over literary forgery scandal

The Amazon logo on a distribution center in Douai, northern France.

AP - Michel Spinler

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

Clothing, sneakers, leather goods, luxury goods… The counterfeit market is running at full speed on Amazon, the e-commerce giant.

A survey by the daily

reveals that publishing is also affected by the scourge of literary counterfeiting.

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Falsified versions, dubious translations, rewritten passages… beware of fake books, at very attractive prices, sold online, on Amazon.

On the platform, cases of literary counterfeits have multiplied in recent years.

Novels, like those of the writer Georges Orwell, mangas, but also many technical works.

As the

explains , these are, in general, pirated copies, printed from PDF files, placed online illegally.

The fault with the algorithm used by Amazon, which is not able to identify counterfeits.

The first purchase option offered to Internet users is, in fact, the cheapest version, and not the official offer of the publisher.

As a result, the author is not paid, but Amazon continues to receive a commission on each sale.

The e-commerce giant refutes the accusations of publishers who accuse it of not being very active.

Amazon says it invested $900 million last year to rid its platform of counterfeit products.

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