21 July 2010
Here are some extracts from emails I’ve been receiving about what appears to be a company of thieves with possibly a huge list of titles, all available on Amazon.
I checked out reviews on Amazon for some other books by these clowns ... the reviews all said essentially the same thing:
“[ The product ] is a collection of wikipedia articles on these books. Mucho misleading marketing by this publisher.”
“Books LLC, Alphascript Publishing, Betascript Publishing, Fastbooks and General Books LLC - these are all imprints of a company called VDM Publishing ... completely unethical in their marketing and product descriptions. Between the different imprints, they have 500,000 odd books listed on Amazon now.”
Given such a crappy product, why should anyone buy? The answer is: it looks like a promise of free books after you’ve done so.
Pause for reality check: It may only be Books LLC’s crappy product that’s on sale here. I’d be happy with that; I fear it being something more.
I just spoke with our Amazon liaison, and he said that although this is fraud, and the company (in its various bogus incarnations) is seeming to sell entire backlists, in actuality what the buyer gets is a self-published (if you could call it that) stapled 56 page compendium of cover copy and wikipedia listings. Amazon is refusing to take this material down. The first (and biggest) Penguin author that this happened to was Ken Follett and the Penguin legal team couldn’t get anywhere with Amazon ... Media is only 30% of their business, and that includes DVDs, Videos, and CDs as well as books. At least Tad is in good company ... But even though books might be only a tiny percentage of their business, they are still the world’s largest bookstore by a huge margin. The whole aim of their business is different than ours ... It’s not a great situation for publishers or authors.
