Amazon allegedly resells damaged books

Author from original post here! For clarification, this is not a new thing, but something I learned to do from this post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;kristadb1.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3kb4wbixaux2x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;kristadb1.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3kb4wbix...</a><p>In her case, she ordered author copies (that gives you no royalties, of course) and got the same copies sold again to herself as author copies.<p>In my case, I also ordered author copies, but they were resold to a normal customer after I returned them.<p>From an order of 50 author copies, I returned 14. Packaging was fine, so it wasn’t a problem with how they bumped up during shipping. They were misprinted, or had folded covers (they tear easily after a fold, really bad), some were printed beyond the bleed area (that’s what bleed is for, you can’t be printing beyond it), and a few were printed slightly off angle. One particularly bad copy was even cut an inch smaller than it should’ve been, trimming every single page and cover, text and all.<p>So yeah, that’s why I returned them. But I do give you that some of those defects would go completely unseen by someone at a warehouse. You flip through the book, all pages seem to be there, but how is a person there supposed to know what the margins of the book look like? But most errors would not pass a regular printing press QC, particularly the damaged covers.<p>Also, Amazon both prints and distributes these books, so QC is in their hands from the start.

If you care about the condition of books you buy, don&#x27;t buy from Amazon. They&#x27;ll throw a $100+ hardcover in a lightly padded envelope and chuck it around. Or they&#x27;ll put it in a box with some other random item and a few inflatable shipping bags, but not enough to keep things from shifting around freely.

Before getting pitchforks out, I&#x27;d like to see what this person considered &quot;damaged&quot;. If - and I know this is a big if - but if it&#x27;s something extremely minor, such that almost anyone would consider it to be in &quot;like new&quot; condition, then frankly that would be a case of Amazon doing the right thing, rather than pulping a perfectly good book and printing a new one. The fact that this person is apparently not providing any photos of said damage makes this hard to judge (and honestly raises my suspicions a bit).<p>&gt; Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed.<p>Why wouldn&#x27;t this be true? Why would a return that is then resold result in a double royalty payment? Is that something that happens for traditionally-published books that are returned and resold?<p>It might have to do with the fact that these particular books were &quot;author&#x27;s copies&quot; but I don&#x27;t have enough information about how those work in a print-on-demand context to know whether this actually results in a loss of royalties in this case. Did they pay for them to be printed as a self publisher or were they provided for free as part of a contract with an external publisher? Does Amazon&#x27;s internal system distinguish between &quot;author&quot; copies&quot; and other orders, or do you just order some copies of your own book via the standard interface? Would the author&#x27;s replacement copies go through that same system or would they be printed like normal and incur royalties? No idea.

From the author&#x27;s perspective, this is not expected according to their agreement with Amazon. Unfortunately from the consumer&#x27;s perspective, this is not surprising at all. Everyone I know has received a &quot;used&quot; item sold as &quot;new, sold by Amazon.com.&quot; Whether it&#x27;s due to commingling, or an attempt to reduce waste, or plain corporate greed, I have no idea. Just saying that if I returned a book on Amazon, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it was soon sold to someone else, even if I was the author of the book.

&gt; Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed.

Recently Amazon has been sending me items that were clearly returned and poorly repackaged or damaged in the last year. This isn’t something I encountered or noticed prior to 2023.<p>Their screening policy for returned items may have changed.

My favorite, or I suppose least favorite…, was when I received a “new” book that came with a bookmark of a single square of toilet paper.<p>Unsure about you all but there’s only one reason I might use a square of toilet paper as a bookmark.

The way this is said makes it seem like they&#x27;re expecting to be paid twice for two orders, one returned.<p>I assume what&#x27;s being left implicit is that they&#x27;re actually <i>not</i> paid for the &#x27;KDP printing order&#x27; if it ends up returned? So then when someone else orders and receives that one and doesn&#x27;t return it, there&#x27;s a printed copy that was never paid out for?

I feel like Amazon is so shady nowadays. I ordered a CD drive a while back just incase I needed it, and the brand&#x2F;seller included a thing to get a gift card if leaving a review. I thought that was a little unethical, like a bribe so I mentioned in the review giving them like a 3 star if I remember. The next day Amazon disables my ability to leave reviews on that seller, and anytime I go review other sellers my reviews are held for review when they used to be instant from what I remembered, unless they changed it for everyone.

I guess I believe it&#x27;s possible, but I&#x27;ve ordered hundreds of books off Amazon for going on 25 years now, and I&#x27;ve never not gotten books in the condition I paid for. It feels like it would be a weird and ineffective scam for them to pull, not exactly lucrative and pretty easy to get caught on. As I say, possible, but <i>weird</i> if true.

Amazon does this with everything damaged that is returned.

The realities of a warehouse operation make this inevitable (I’ve run an 8-figure&#x2F;yr online distributor). Amazon cannot take the customer’s word on return condition. Folks just click “damaged” to get a refund and Amazon has to have warehouse workers, not professional book inspectors, receive the returns and note their condition.<p>This is good enough since someone buying the used copy can also return it if they disagree.

I rarely buy new books anymore. I just use ThriftBooks. Haven’t had a problem with any of the books they’ve sent me.

They also ship books in oversized boxes with no padding. If you&#x27;re &quot;lucky&quot;, they combined your book order with your order for something hard and heavy that can help beat the book up while the box tumbles.<p>Not always, but often enough that if I order a book from them, I try to remind myself to to wait to order until nothing else I&#x27;ve ordered has yet to ship. Then wait after I&#x27;ve ordered the book, until the book has shipped, before I order anything else.<p>I don&#x27;t order that much from Amazon, but my orders often &quot;cluster&quot;. For a recent example, the Christmas holidays. I got a beat up book cover because they upped the delivery date of the book by about a week (newish best seller), while in the meantime I&#x27;d ordered a heavy object that always ships the next day and that I didn&#x27;t want to wait a week plus for. So, jacketed hardcover arrives loose in the oversized space next to big, heavy, sharp edged object, with no padding whatsoever inside the box.<p>I guess if I&#x27;d returned that book, it simply would have gone -- damaged -- to someone else.

Ironically books are the one thing I don&#x27;t buy on Amazon. eBay has a much better experience, easily 9 times out of 10 I&#x27;m confident I&#x27;m buying the book in the picture, and usually there are several pictures of the exact condition.

I’ve never personally bought a book from Amazon but my wife has a few times and each time she’s returned it saying it looked beat up. I figured she was just being picky (very on brand) but perhaps she was onto something.

I found this quote enlightening:<p>&gt; From: Joaquín Baldwin, @joabaldwin &gt; Of note: if a customer orders a copy from Amazon, and a damaged, returned book &gt; is shipped to them instead, no new KDP printing orders kick in. This means I &gt; don’t get paid at all, because they only pay me when a book is printed. They &gt; stole my money while scamming a customer.<p>So the author wants to be paid royalties on books he says are &quot;damaged&quot; that are brand new but that he says can not be sold to customers?<p>We recently discussed abuses of copyright law. This qualifies as an abuse of copyright law IMHO.

Yes. I purchased The Capital by Karl Marx for my son; at least 5% of the pages were blank.

Who returns books?