Books LLC scam on Amazon

Submitted by Kasper Souren on November 25, 2010 - 17:50

I love books about linguistics and I've been learning Hebrew and Arabic for a while now. So I was happy to see this title on Amazon: Semitic Linguistics: Proto-Semitic Language, Semitic Root, Status Constructus, Broken Plural, Nonconcatenative Morphology, Emphatic Consonant.

Scam LLC

I ordered it without too much thought. When the shipment arrived I was a bit surprised at how thin the book was, which costs almost 10 quid. I took it with me on a trip without looking into it. In the train I opened the book and I felt had. It's fucking scam.

Apparently Books LLC is taking articles from Wikipedia and putting them up for sale on Amazon. Perfectly legal, thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. But it's still a fucking rip-off. Especially since they can come up with tons of new "books" every day like this.

The problem lies with Amazon

The main problem here lies with Amazon. I really don't understand why they accept selling this book. It screws up their name and it will be a while before I order books again there without deep scrutiny of the books - which makes it less likely I'll buy there.

Today I shipped back the book, which costs me 6 euros, but it's worth every euro if it makes Amazon consider taking Books LLC crap off of their online store... And apart from writing it off with this blog post I left some more reviews for books from Books LLC on Amazon.

Meanwhile it would be good if the Wikimedia Foundation dives into this and starts selling printed Wikipedia articles themselves. I would be happy to buy these since it would look much better, and the money would go to support Wikipedia. And if it turns out to be a genuine success we won't have to look at Jimbo next year whenever we look up something on Wikipedia ;)

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous on December 1, 2010 - 18:24.

Thank you Amazon

I sent the book back to Amazon and got the refund. I hope more people who were fooled by Books LLC will do this and thus force Amazon to stop selling this waste of paper.

Submitted by Anonymous on December 2, 2010 - 04:08.

These people got me too

Use Alibris, they are cheaper and support independent book stores. Amazon is the real scam

Submitted by Anonymous on January 11, 2011 - 05:56.

Books LLC is ripping off OUR website material & name

I am president of the board of the national nonprofit organization Forfeiture Endangers American Rights Foundation ("FEAR"). While searching Amazon last week, we discovered that Books LLC -- through 9 on-line sellers including Amazon itself -- have posted a title on Amazon entitled "Asset Forfeiture: Usa V. $124,700, Nicholas L. Bissell, Jr., Forfeiture Endangers American Rights [Paperback]". This listing falsely suggests that FEAR either wrote or published this book. I have not read the book, but it appears from the title that the book consists of pages downloaded from our website. "U.S. v. $124,700" and the "Nicholas Bissel Jr. story" are both the titles of original articles written by FEAR personnel and published on our website. FEAR did not give Books LLC authorization to republish anything from the FEAR website. Using FEAR's name in the title falsely suggests that FEAR was the author or publisher of this "book", which constitutes an invasion of FEAR's right of publicity -- as well as false advertising. The listing notes in small print that the book is 26 pages long - yet it sells for around $20 plus shipping and handling! A dollar per page for material that is free on the internet is a scam in itself. I also noticed that some of the sellers ship from overseas -- another scam to make it harder for people to get their money back once they realize they've been scammed.

I immediately contacted Amazon and all of the listed sellers. Two of the sellers took the listing down, but the rest didn't respond. Amazon has not done anything. When I called them today they said they are still investigating. Its customer service department could not find a phone number for Books LLC.

I think I will send Amazon's legal department the URL to this web page, so they can see that Amazon's reputation is being sullied by letting these scams continue.

Submitted by Anonymous on January 15, 2011 - 11:56.

Books Llc

Thanks for the WARNING, I also found a title that sounded interesting but, being a natural sceptic, did a search for the 'author' Llc and ended up here.

Submitted by Anonymous on February 8, 2011 - 17:02.

Alphascript publishing

Alphascript publishing is another scam. If you go to Amazon and go to advanced search and type in Alphacript in the publisher spot you'll see they have 100,000 books and their all Wikipedia articles. These bogus companies are making tons of money. They have a small disclaimer and most all their covers are the same. They probably go to Staples or some other store in town and print these junk books on demand. Are company just got taking for $90 buck. I wonder how it works it Amazon or Wikipedia get a cut.

Submitted by Anonymous on April 14, 2011 - 01:03.

Books LLC

I'm with Books LLC and we get as annoyed as you when Amazon doesn't run our descriptions that tell readers that a book consist entirely of Wikipedia articles!

Our website and the book descriptions we ask booksellers to display prominently credit Wikipedia as the source, include an excerpt of one of the Wikipedia articles, a URL to read the full article at Wikipedia, and the titles of other Wikipedia articles in the book (space permitting) that readers can use to read the content at Wikipedia without buying the book. The book itself credits Wikipedia as the source on the publisher's page, in the Introduction and at the end of every chapter.

My sincere apologies if Amazon didn't display that description! I understand your annoyance.

Submitted by Anonymous on June 16, 2011 - 01:36.

I was working on a wikipedia

I was working on a wikipedia article, and ordered a book from Books LLC in-order to enrich my article. When the book came, I was surprised to see my own writing in the book !!!

Submitted by Anonymous on July 9, 2011 - 06:54.

It is such an obvious scam

Similarly, I ordered one and immediately returned it back to Amazon.
I am surprised at how Amazon fascilitates the scam.

Submitted by Anonymous on August 11, 2012 - 04:53.

amazon scam

I just had the same problem. I bought a book from what turned out to be amazon.llc. I plant to return it as well. Apparently, photos are not put in the books since the quality of the photos are poor. If true, this is indeed a scam. I don't think the intent of creative commons was to allow poor reproductions of originally copyrighted material.