On Amazon, the worrying business of counterfeit books


Many authors found that the e-commerce giant was selling counterfeit versions of their book. Gorodenkoff Productions/stock.adobe.com

INVESTIGATION – Many books are pirated, printed at low cost and then resold online at steep discounts.

One fine morning in July, David Flanagan, a Tesla engineer in Washington State, made a startling discovery. By receiving a copy of his latest book, JavaScript. The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly Media), ordered on Amazon, he is surprised by several defects. “The cover is poorly printed, the paper is thicker, the ink is rubbing off on my fingers, and entire chapters are missing”, he confides. Very quickly, he realizes that he holds in his hands a counterfeit version of his book. A few days earlier, 8,000 kilometers away, Frenchman Aurélien Géron, residing in Auckland, New Zealand, made a similar observation for his manual Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and TensorFlow.

In search of comparable testimonies on the social network Twitter, the two men (published by the same publisher) then come across a very popular publication by a certain François Chollet, who denounces “the worrying business of counterfeit

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