So I’ve never been terribly fond of Amazon.com for many reasons (they are a giant welfare queen, they put b&m bookstores out of business, the Kindle is disposable rather than repairable, … feel free to add your own grievances to the list).
But today I learned of yet another atrocity. In this case it is not really Amazon’s fault, though it is something they tolerate and apparently make no effort to stop. I am talking about “bookjacking” — the practice of using software to find books listed on one but not another book seller site (Amazon, Abebooks, Half.com, etc.) and automatically relisting said item on the other sites, at a markup. And by “markup” I mean a potentially huge markup. Though you could say “caveat emptor” and yeah you should probably shop around, the fact is that they are exploiting and hurting consumers, plain and simple. By automating this process, these phony sellers are able generate sales, and feedback, so that they look legit, even though they just act as middlemen and do nothing but run algorithms through the sites. A more detailed explanation of the process is here at Zubal Books’ site. Do not patronize the bookjackers identified there.
If you are like me, you occasionally purchase out of print titles. These bookjackers drive up prices and use deceptive advertisements (see Zubal Books above — the bookjackers use weasel words and ambiguous, generic descriptions because they are not examining the merchandise, they never see it). If you want to see what bookjacking looks like for RPG titles, see this listing (it will no doubt change over time but as of this writing there are listings for the Judges Guild “Dark Tower” module with prices all ranging from $115 to over $325, and all the conditions are blank or generic BS like this: “Item may show signs of shelf wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. Includes supplemental or companion materials if applicable. Access codes may or may not work. Connecting readers since 1972. Customer service is our top priority.” (emphasis added)
<Update!> A colleague suggested another way to check if a seller is bookjacking:
Check to see if they offer expedited shipping. They cannot because they do not have the book in hand. This also applies to a seller supplying a print on demand title. In addition, this will separate out sellers who allegedly are located in the US but ship from the UK–or Norway or India or wherever.
<Update!> Bookjackers are also harming legitimate book sellers by skewing Amazon’s algorithms for book pricing. See this discussion.
Swords & Dorkery 
Fascinating….I had seen listing like these but had no idea what the logic was behind them.
I used to assume the generic descriptions were being used because a huge dealer couldn’t necessarily take the time to describe each book they had after assigning a “condition,” but going forward I won’t be giving the benefit of the doubt.
Another thing about bookjacking that bothers me is that it creates an impression that there are more copies available than there really are. Grr.
Several of the “resellers” on the Amazon Marketplace with the largest amounts of sales / feedback do this. I try to keep track of which ones I have dealt with so I don’t do it again. Books in unexpected conditions and crappy shipping materials and “slow-boat to China” delivery times really aggravate me. Whats also strange is that AbeBooks and BookDepository for instance are actually OWNED by Amazon these days.
Zubal Books identifies the following “sellers” as bookjackers, but I think they all also use various permutations of their names (adding a state, changing spacing or punctuation, etc.):
academic_book_guy
ADONAI BOOKS
Amctj
anstinbooks
Bookbyte123
BookGroveMedia
Book Smart
Books_Care
BookSleuth
Castle Rock
Colibris
Crashing Rocks
DailyDeal USA
East West Academic Books
Elitedigital
ExtremelyReliable
fast-track-books
FishandSave
International Books
jason_kurt
joypros
kime_enterprises
KingsRidgeMedia
lana’s Shop
lance books
Lost Books
metropole_press
Migna Book Store
Murray Media
MyGrandmasGoodies
nearfine-us
NOHINSA BOOKS
nuggetbooks33
OTTAPLACKAL BOOKS
Park Place Products
planet_books
profnath
Quality7
relationship
shopbychoice
southlandplace
Summit Read
technobookshop
Thebookcommunity
thebookgrove
TSCBOOKS
Vault Media
UCAEDU70
US_Bookseller
Vault Media
Woody’s Books
worldreaders
Wisepenny Books
I think Book Rescue!! of Burdett New York is probably a bookjacker also — based on the great number of books they order from us, which they have at the same time listed at Amazon for triple the price.
Thanks, good to know!
Please add MelisaSandy to the above bookjackers. MelisaSandy were listing an item, a unique signed and numbered book, which they didn’t have in stock nor were entitled to sell. They were also listing it at 4 times the price of the item direct from the publisher. Eventually, after intercession by the publisher and Amazon, the item was delisted. However, if you check MelisaSandy’s site, you will find countless instances of the same situation. Caveat emptor.
Will add that nearfine is currently the source of my own book jacking problem. I have taken screen shots of everything, and will not let this drop if they scam me (not confirmed yet, but looking that way…). What i hate about being scammed online is the anonymous, opaque smoke and mirrors, that allows these people to take advantage of honest people and get away with it without any kind of revenge possible. You can’t punch a virtual book seller on the nose.
I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with quality7 and now, Murray Media, who got me for over $120. AbeBooks are jerks when it comes to filing disputes. I will never buy from AbeBooks again if they do not fix this!
Bookholders.com is a brick and mortar store that routinely rips people off. The owner, Joe Verde, even stalked me on Facebook after I launched a campaign against him. The guy is psychotic.
Your RPG example is hillarious! I picked up the d20 Dark Tower for $1 at Paizo’s sale last year.
And yeah, this sort of predatory tactic is sad. But that’s capitalism for you!
I began to wonder if it was really a rarity when I saw how much it was going for. Insane.
I don’t want to go all political here, but man, captitalism really has a way of dropping a duce on some things. Not that I have any better ideas for an alternative.
I don’t blame capitalism. I blame Robo-capitalism. Cold, heartless robots…
🙂
It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. One alternative would be companies that sell stuff online to take some responsibility for what they allow sellers to do. But I guess they would only do that if they gave a rat’s ass about consumers, which they really don’t. So it’s caveat emptor.
I’ll occasionally buy new books on Amazon, but never used books. Almost all of my book purchases these days come from Abe Books. I’ve had really good experiences, by and far, and the selection and price is outstanding. I target sellers who run actual B&M stores across the U.S. and U.K.
ABEbooks is actually owned by Amazon. Try Biblio.com instead!
Thanks for the heads up. My significant other buys a lot of used books online; I’ll email her this.
The generic quote you posted comes from Half Price Books. Amazon is very particular about how HPB is listed on line. Some stores are HPB (insert state here), while others have different names.
What you quoted is purposefully vague for exactly the reason you originally assumed. HPB is a big seller, though each store is responsible for its own online sales.
The prices are also something HPB does not control. There is an automatic price set from a program called Monsoon, which operates in Amazon. It looks at other prices at Amazon and adjusts the sale price accordingly. However, like in the example with Dark Tower, it is not always effective if other sellers set unrealistic prices.
I’m actually really surprised by that listing.
In any case, I just wanted to mention what was going on for at least one of those entries. Book jacking is a crazy thing that is incredibly frustrating because it so deeply impacts legitimate booksellers.
Interesting! Thanks!
as someone else pointed out, you actually quoted half price books description, and they are NOT a bookjacker, they are a legitimate brick and mortar retailer.
the book listing you give illustrates however what a big problem the bookjacking scam is. if you look at that listing for Judges Guild 3 Dark Tower there is only ONE legitimate seller selling that book (blackrazor_books). the other “sellers” are the usual bookjacker scammers–dailydeals, anybook, murraymedia and brookebooks. as a result the seller blackrazor is vastly underpricing his book, but doesnt know it
Hallo there,
I still don’t quite get what bookjacking is all about. How can a bookjacker list a book on any site if he or she doesn’t own a copy of it? Do they buy it from the original lister, then sell it after they have received it? The description of bookjacking doesn’t seem to support this option, as it is said that they never get to see the book. It’s all still a mystery to me. Please could somebody explain in more detail how a bookjacker can list a book to sell that he or she does not have in his or her possession?
I look forward to hearing some kind of an answer to my question.
Thanking you in anticipation.
It’s a variation on “drop shipping”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping) The bookjacker lists the item, and takes payment, then sends payment to whoever is actually selling it, and gives the seller the address of the buyer. The difference between what the bookjacker got and what the actual seller gets is the bookjacker’s profit. This can be a few cents or (when things work as planned) a lot more — the buyer either doesn’t see the original listing because it is on another website or chooses the inflated price from the bookjacker because the bookjacker has thousands of sales and mostly good feedback while the jacked seller has much less feedback and seems less reputable. Does make sense? They are basically inserting themselves as middle-men.
Thank you very much for your comprehensive reply. I had thought this could be the only way the bookjacker could do this, but I was not sure. It would be interesting to find out what the buyer would say when he or she saw the invoice from the original seller — say myself — as I take it that the bookjacker would not bother to let on to me what he has just done.
Once again, thank you for your informtive little blog. it was most interesting to find out what these thieves get up to. Although, I suppose they’re not really stealing the book, as they do send the original seller the money.
Shame on them!
I had this happen when I bought a DVD set which included a booklet. The condition was supposed to be new, in shrink-wrap. I bought it from a seller in PA. It was drop-shipped to me from somewhere other than PA. It was not shrink-wrapped nor did it include the booklet. And, get this, it DID include an invoice showing the seller was charged a lot less than he charged me. I, too, keep a list of sellers I will not use again. Many of them are on Zubal’s list. I also steer away from sellers who will not state where they are shipping from. In my experience, that is another clue they are a bookjacker. I have also seen several sellers located in a geographic area all selling a book with the same condition statement and increasing prices. All of them were “established” within a month or two of each other. According to the Better Business Bureau, they are simply PO boxes, all forwarding to one box. Bookjackers are an enormous problem for me when I am trying to purchase multiple copies of an OP title. GAK!
As for Zubal, it looks to me like they’re now in the business of selling (for 9.99) ‘ebooks’ that are freely available on the Internet Archive. E-Books Delivery Service and greatpdfbooks.com are associated with Tom Zubal of Cleveland, according to ABE and whois searching.
So much for the good old fashioned family business. Calling out the bookjackers made someone look good.
Taking money for nothing — that doesn’t look so great.
Well that’s pretty disappointing.
LOL HE SOUNDS LIKE A DIRTY FUCK HIMSELF BUT ITS STILL GOOD HE BROUGHT ALL THIS UP ABOUT DROPSHIPPERS, ALTHOUGH I THINK HE SLIGHTLY MISUNDERSTOOD HOW THEY WORK
in practice dropshippers arent just dropshipping, they are doing crooked things and breaking the rules of sites such as amazon. amazon allows them to do this because a drop shipped transaction produced more than one commission per transaction because the dropshipper has to buy a book for another party on amazon. in practice dropshippers arent as technologically savvy as people think, all they do is buy amazons apis and list a couple million books and that is enough to produce a couple thousand transactions a day. they dont check other sites for availability, which is why they have so many cancellations and “lost in the mail” feedbacks. in practice they sell “new” and dropship “used–very good”, sell paperback and dropship hardcover (or vice versa), sell one edition and dropship and earlier edition, send the wrong book (eg sell the oxford shakespeare and send the signet shakespeare) and they create new listings, in violation of amazon rules, in order to sell items for higher prices (they open a new listings and sell a book for $50 when its available on the official amazon page for $2). again all this misconduct has the blessing of amazon because it produces MULTIPLE SALES for amazon. so dont expect amazon to ever stop dropshipping.if fact they have recently taken steps to try to force it on their site by creating the buy box which lets them award a sale to the dropshipper of their choosing. in order to make a book available to a drop shipper, amazon delists the items of real sellers and forces them to lower their prices. AMAZON IS A TOTALLY CROOKED COMPANY
That’s for sure. Amazon lets some scammer use MY business name, and *I* get the complaint calls and bad FaceBook reviews when they send someone a used book instead of a new one, or the wrong edition. Amazon won’t even take my complaint because I am not the buyer, and refuse to get an account with their Evil Empire. I hope Jeff Bezos DIES IN A FIRE!!!
Joe.
The first 80% of your post is an excellent summary of bookjacking.
However, the last 20% is slightly mistaken. Amazon does not deliberately promote bookjackers through the buy box.
Amazon invented the buy box to make buying quick and easy for buyers who just want to buy without having to do price comparison.
Amazon is not really pro or con about bookjacking.
The whole bookjacking business is simply not big enough to be on Amazon’s radar yet. So what if a few hundred sales per day are fraudulent – maybe even a few thousand. That is nothing compared to Amazon’s 25 to 50 million sales per day.
Amazon just doesn’t care about something that is several places to the right of the decimal point.
The buy box is often owned by bookjackers because they have learned to manipulate the buy box algorithm. Amazon is not giving the buy box to bookjackers; rather the bookjackers are stealing it.
Best regards
CBEM
Ooops! I meant ‘Jon’, not ‘Joe’.
all the book sites–amazon, alibris, abe, half are all filled with these drop ship scammers. there are almost no actual books sellers anymore, i guess its not worth it for most people to bother selling and have to deal with all these dropshippers. the sites themselves seem only to want big drop ship scammers, i see tons of smaller amazon sellers being kicked off for minor infractions while dropshippers get away with anything
The drosphippers/bookjackers get away with violations because they bribe Amazon employees.
Many Amazon employees are in India, where the average YEARLY income is below $4,000 US. In big cities like New Dehli, it may be more like $7,000.
For an employee in India, receiving a few hundred dollars per month in bribes is huge. For an American bookjacker, who is getting a thousand sales per day, paying the bribe is a minor expense.
The most notorious case of bribery came to light in spring of 2021 when some unnamed Amazon employee got caught taking money from a bookjacker in Dallas. The employee was removing negative feedback. Amazon fired the employee, and terminated several seller accounts.
The bookjacker just opened more selling accounts, and continued business as usual. Except now when he gets negative feedback, it stays.
F**k these sellers. They really piss me off with their retarded prices. Many times when looking for something at Amazon, these clowns pop up and are the only sellers offering an item for sale.. Vault Media and Thebookcommunity being the absolute worst offenders, although i’ve seen other sellers from the mentioned list when I’m searching out-of-print old CDs at Amazon at bad prices as well, so why bother? I really wish they get kicked out of Amazon. These sellers ruin my otherwise good experience at Amazon. It should be noted that many of these sellers also operate in other Amazon Marketplaces (the_book_community AKA rbmbooks at Amazon.co.uk and Vault Media AKA EliteDigital DE at Amazon.de.)
Add KELINDO to the list as well. One of the many stupid drop shippers from Japan. Hope they all get banned.
Our book just got hijacked by KELINDO – on Amazon. How are the authors dealing with this??
in textbooks this process is a true disaster; today textbooks no longer sell just book alone; they are bundled, have scratch off access codes, and offer ancillaries; all this is described in great detail in the textbook’s description; the jackers wipe out seller description; then the student may get a book “not as described” f ex because the cloud access code has been used and he expects one…
I have asked jackers to cancel their order ’cause it is for the “wrong” book; they refuse and expect the seller to do this for them;
I sell books on Amazon only that I have in stock, I give descriptions of condition on nearly all my items so I am a target for bookjackers. The majority of orders will come through with the delivery address adding NO INVOICE to the first line, alternatively at times I might get asked on EBay to post the book to the customer’s address as it is not possible on EBay to put in an alternative delivery address as on Amazon.
These orders are more likely to be problematic than orders from the public, with the purchaser claiming non delivery or not as described, of course the purchaser has never seen the book and as many items are not of high value and sent untracked, this can mean that we are later forced to refund the purchase price.
I have no complaint with booksellers buying from us when they do not ask us to drop ship, and we get a fair few orders from these. For sure some people do not want to scour the web themselves for books and so ask a dealer to source copies for them, especially if they are looking for a number of titles; or the bookseller has simply spotted an opportunity to make money on a title, every seller has to source stock to sell and these sellers just happen to use the Internet to do so.
Sussex Used Books (UK)
Wish I had known about this and the list before making the HUGE mistake of making a purchase from one of these sellers on Amazon! The seller was Wisepenny Books, who swindle more than just through the means of bookjacking. I bought a $190 textbook from them on the first day of my college class, and 4 days later it still hadn’t shipped. I contacted them telling them I needed the book ASAP for a class or I would cancel, and they didn’t respond for 3 days. Messaged them on the 3rd day saying I was canceling the order since I bought the book elsewhere and hadn’t received a response and the book hadnt shipped before then. According to USPS tracking they shipped my book literally 30 minutes after my email. They lied and said that they had shipped the book before they got my message. I received the book, and sent it back since it had been their mistake of sending a book that they had seen was cancelled. They returned most of my money but they charged me a ~~$40~~ restocking fee and didnt pay the $13 of return shipping back. Although their return policy said that the restocking fee only applied to books that were returned if the problem with the book was not the fault of the seller! They also claimed the book was no longer “New” so it could not be sold as such even though I hadn’t even opened the book from it’s packaging. To get my $40 back I spent 12+ hours over the span of 25 days calling Amazon customer service who are completely incapable of taking action against sellers who clearly are swindling their customers like this. I sent them several messages they didn’t bother responding to, and would only respond if Amazon forced them to reply to me. I’ve also been constantly checking their order rating by customers, and 99% of the bad reviews get taken down by the seller within a day or two. NEVER make the same mistake that I did and buy from Wisepenny, who I’m sure isn’t the only bookjacker who also leeches off of people’s hard earned money (some of whom who is struggling to get by like my family and I) through Amazon’s “we don’t have control over the actions of third party sellers, so sorry we can’t do anything,” policy.
KELINDO out of Japan – just listed our book, for $34.99 and we are listing for $9.99 – we called Amazon – and were told to fill out paperwork and got a bunch of crap to deal with. It’s like the new version of Identity Theft. Has anyone find a way to deal with this???
Hey, they gave you the option of filling out paperwork? You’re ahead of me, then… F*ck Jeff Bezos sideways with a CACTUS! *grrr*
I believe i have recently become a victim of book jackers; and i want to warn others of this unethical practice. Here is what happens.
– You are looking for a rare book
– You at last find it
– The price seems inflated but you pay (say cost new 10 dollars, but you pay 40 for a very good condition used copy)
– The order is confirmed by the marketplace, but the market place seller has 72 hours to confirm or reject the order
– Market place seller robot picks up sale. Price is multipled by 2, 3, 4 (say 3); book is sold to you, but remains advertised on market place, now at 120 Dollars
– Second buyer spots rare book, buys 120 Dollars
– Market place seller robotics picks up sale. Price doubled to 240 dollars (book already sold twice)
_ Market place seller picks up sale. Price increased 50 percent; becomes 360 Dollars
– Book does not sell within 48 hours
– Book sold to buyer who paid 240 Dollars. First buyer @ 20 and 120 Dollars receive order cancelled emails.
Book jacker wins. Book sold at maximum price after already securing 2 sales at a lower price. Amazon/Abe Books/low morality other channel wins, due charging commission on the sold amount. Customers are scammed; particularly those who recieve the order cancellation after purchasing the book.
Now that i understand the mechanism, i am furious. I am still waiting for near fine to confirm my order, and I am still seeing my book (so rare impossible they have multiple copies..) on the sites mentionned at 3 times the price since my order was placed. No wonder corporate profits are soring for these companies. This must stop.
That is so devious. But Amazon seems to have no incentive to stop it, because they get their cut of any sale. The spice must flow.
They have 20 hours left to confirm or reject the sale. i still see the (now my…) book for sale on Abe Books and 4 Amazon (Japan, France, US and Germany…) sites from the same seller at triple the price. It does not seem to have sold to an additional buyer so far. I have time stamped prints of everything. In the event the sale is not confirmed, and my book not received, I will go to “repression des fraudes” in France; a government organisation to surpress such behaviour. We will see; I will stick like unwanted chewing gum if the try to screw me over. I wont go down without a fight! 😛
Hope you got the f*ckers! It’s nice that the EU sees through Amazon and protects consumers. Wish the US politicians weren’t kissing Bezos’ a$$…
In addition to using Jubal’s list, I keep my own list of marketplace sellers I will not use again. One way to get on that list is to ship from someplace other than what shows in the seller description. I leave very negative feedback when this happens. I now print the screen showing “ships from GA”, “ships from NY”, etc. When I receive the book from India or Switzerland or wherever, I go back to Amazon, Alibris, AbeBooks, & complain. Several times, they have refunded the shipping cost. I have noticed several sellers now state “may ship from multiple locations.” I do not use them. The book may arrive within the estimated delivery timeframe but I could have received it a week earlier from a seller shipping from a US location. I buy for an academic library so time is sometimes more important than price.
Is your list public? I work for an academic library too now, and I’d want to share it with our Acquisitions folks.
I both sell & buy books on Half.com with five kids in college over recent years (still only like 100+ sales.) To combat book jacking companies, (which I only recently found what they are call but previously realized existed), I ALWAYS ONLY buy from 100% positive feedback sellers, ALWAYS check negative feedback (& reasons) from any seller with numerous sales (99.3% positive on a seller with 65,000 in sales still means MANY negatives), & ONLY buy from sellers shipping from the continental US (due to my location). Be sure the book IS NOT an international or teachers illegal addition. Now having all tracking on Media Mail is a definite plus to prove a delivery dispute later. Finally, when receiving a new invoice for a sale, I check for the buyer being different from the mailing address (likely book jacker). If the seller’s name is not complete (has occured several times recently or address cannot be verified through contact with the seller) then no sale & not worth the risk. I include these facts in communication explaining the reason.
i am becoming increasingly careful now. When its a book that is not commonly available, I now systematically contact the seller before making the purchase, I make sure they actually have a copy, and I ask for information about it (pencil marks, cover condition etc). For the order I listed above, it was indeed cancelled by the vendor, I was furious, but not surprised. I have since found a further copy of the book, the order was confirmed, and the book is allegedly on its way…allegedly… :).
Zenbookstore mailed me a book for $601. that can be purchased for $25 new on other sites. I was tricked by a one click purchase and thought I was agreeing to a $60.10 purchase more than it was worth however I decided in this situation to pay this much. When I saw the price was $601 I emailed the seller to cancel-they delayed responding until two days later they said the book had already been mailed. This seller’s address is in Barbados however the book was mailed from the Amazon fullfillment center in Lexington,KY. Needless to say, they state they will refund my money minus a 15% restocking fee-around $90 for a book that can be purchased other places for $25. Yes I am stupid however I do not plan to roll over on this. Amazon states that I will not end up having to pay shipping or restocking fees and I believe them at this point.
Wow. That is brazen.
You have to be really careful these days. I just bought a music book that is becoming difficult to find. The retail price was 20 US Dollars new; but some places are selling the book for ten times that amount as its becoming scarce. I eventually found an old stock new copy at the correct price (2 hours of research and it turned up pretty much on my doorstep…). Sometimes you have to just be patient; or be careful with your keyword searches. Whatever the case, there is no excuse for such behavior; and particularly with a multi-national like Amazon behind.
My issue with Amazon appears resolved, the charge has been taken off my credit card. I still say “buyer beware”.
I appreciate this article. I was never aware of “bookjacking” until today. I am an author and what led me to take a closer look at “Wisepenny” was the fact that one of my titles was on sale (through Wisepenny/Amazon) for $3,402.00. It was on sale through another company at over $4,000.00. While this title of mine has been a good seller in several editions for 28 years, there is no way that the 3rd edition copy of this title is a collector’s item. In the future I will refer to the list of book jackers in this article before I pay much over the original retail amount for any hard to find title.
I always look for books on Bookfinder.com to find the cheapest copy for sale anywhere. At the bottom of their listings are usually these bookjacker parasites, listing $20 books for $200 and such. With a little comparison shopping like this, these bottom feeders can be starved out of business. I’d like to know the reason why Jeff Bezos doesn’t clean house himself. He must know this is going on.
My guess is that Amazon gets a cut of all sales through their site.
Amazon gets a commission on each sale; that i believe to be indexed to the value. In short, the higher the price, the more Amazon gets (so not in their business interests to prevent such practices). Unfortunately we get to the fine line between what is ethical business practice versus supply and demand (willingness too pay). A good example concerns rare CDs also. There are often album reissues in the Japanese market, but those reissues are in very limited quantities. A CD retailing at 1000JPY (10 to 15 USD) in 2015 may be valued at 10 to 20 times the price two years later. No one is forced to pay, but enough people will to justify the market. Sad but true; and in the meantime book/CD jackers and Amazon profits soar. concerning availability, i agree with another comment higher in the thread. Having been a victim of disappointment on multiple occasions, I now check before buying.
Murray Media, North Miami Beach, FL – On Dec 11, 2017 I ordered an out of print book from them through Abebooks that was supposedly in-stock & brand new. I paid $15 for expedited shipping because it was a X-mas gift. I received notification through my Abebooks account the next day that it had shipped & the estimated delivery date was Dec 28 however, I received no tracking number. I contacted Murray Media and asked them for a tracking number, but even though Abebooks said it had already shipped, their response was no tracking was available but they’d let me know when it was. So, Dec 28 came & went but still no book or tracking number so I contacted Murray Media again on Jan 2. This time they said their tracking number (which I never received) indicated no activity so it must have been lost in shipment but they would send a new book out to me right away. I responded that they’d need to provide me with a tracking number for the 2’nd shipment or refund my money. Then they responded they would need more time to re-stock the book but by this time I had already contacted my credit card company & disputed the charges. They credited my account for the full purchase price plus shipping and blocked them from charging my account again in the future. Moral of the story – If you mistakenly get tangled up with one of these lying, cheating bookjackers, don’t wait for them to refund your money because they’ll try and string you along in order to get you outside the guaranteed refund window, which in the case of Abebooks is not arrived by the estimated delivery date up until 30 days thereafter. I did finally find the book listed by an individual seller who sent me photos of 3 random pages so I could verify it was actually in his possession. So I purchased it, received a tracking number the very next day & it will arrive this Fri. only 5 days after it was originally ordered. Murray Media is a bookjacker and they suck, but they didn’t get away with ripping off me!!!
Hi Paul. Interesting. Unfortunately you echo the same problem many of us have suffered. Such is borderline with fraud; and whilst Amazon do not make additional efforts to check real availability with their marketplace suppliers, they in my opinion, are complices. Its too easy to sit back, do nothing, and watch the dollars pile up. A simple way to deal with this is as you mentioned. All suppliers should be mandated to provide actual photos of the book (or CD or whatever…) to prove it exists. In this digital age, there is no excuse not too, a photo take and upload takes less than 2 minutes. However, what these sellers do is block your your funds, search in their network for the item, buy it at a much lower price (when they find it…) and you pay the difference. For particularly hard to find items, they often don’t find it, but they tell you its sent (when it never was…) and of course they do not provide tracking because there is no article to track. This way they can confirm their dishonesty by blaming it on the postal system. Its unfortunate, because with a different procedural approach, honest bricks and mortar businesses could flourish increasingly on Market Place rather than be pushed out of business. You get the product you want, Amazon gets its distribution cut, and the store remains in good health. To finish, going back to my photo comment, the new, like new, very good, good and acceptable rating is subjective. This again depends upon the honesty of the seller to accurately describe the articles condition. Photos would back up condition claims by the seller.
Kind regards
Thomas
ALERT! Amazon.com Deals-of-the-Day – Books – Print Books – Hardcover – NEW. As a Prime Member who does Not own, use, and
purchase Kindle editions—I am forced to navigate and search independently with zigzag inefficiency for Print editions. Bozo Bezo, despite a plethora of telephone calls, e-mails, messages… over the past 3-years requesting that Prime members be unchained from automatic lock-in to Kindle Edition display mode on Amazon.com – Books (a supposed benefit of Prime Membership), it, and more
such target marketing, further expends one’s time and energies.
In recent weeks, I have purchased three (3) NEW HC/DJ-Pictured
Books – each from Amazon.com (Not Marketplace Seller),
Deals-of-the-Day, via separate order. Each book was delivered
bare inside a box by Amazon.com Services. And, each book was
“Not As Described & Pictured”! One, No DJ, with a White Amazon.com
Security Sticker on Lower Back Cover – Absolutely Non-Removable
Without Stripping Superficial Layer; Two & Three, DJs had small marks
and large creases; spine head & tail bent; publisher’s overstock black
marker strike at bottom page edges; and, the White Security Sticker!!!
Again, each book was listed, pictured and sold by Amazon.com as NEW HC with DJ. No listing presented additional condition description indicating publisher’s overstock, specific defects, flaws, etc.
Obviously, each fraudulent transaction requires my intervention,
and this process, as you all know so well, steals time and energies,
and adds extraordinary stress. I’m not one to let it ride. Tho’ I believe
this is a New Amazon.com practice deserving attention and ongoing
scrutiny—as such corporate behavior signifies perhaps deeper and
wider corruption of this selling platform and further regression in
real front-line product quality and customer services, fulfillment as
advertised.
Any similar such transactions re: Amazon.com Deals-of-the-Day – Books – Hardcover – NEW, worthy of comment, suggestions, actions…?
Well that is a little off-topic but I’ve long been annoyed by the upsorting of Kindle editions when I’m searching for books. I did own a Kindle for a while (it stopped working after about a year and they are non-reparable, so I just recycled it rather than send it back for the proffered and negligible credit toward a new one).
I have only occasionally ordered books from Amazon that arrive with decals, and fortunately never one that was not readily removed. The one time I had to complain about a book being not as described it was another marketplace seller, and their poor packaging of an oversized trade paperback caused the spine to crack. Amazon refunded me about 10% of the price.
SBS Books Southern Book Services are the real scumbags of this business. They buy books from Amazon Sellers or other Book Sellers. Once it is shipped they claim it is damaged. incorrect or never arrived.
They buy and sell under other names including Murray Media, More Books, Book Warehouse, Any Book and many more. Once they get suspended they change the name and start all over again Check the internet for Southern Book Services Opa Lock or Miami Florida. Owner is a millionaire named Bruce Sardinia who has been stealing peoples books for over 20 years.. CANCEL ANY ORDER FROM SBS!
Southern Book Services used to buy remainder books from me in large bulk (pallets at a time) and resell them to bookstores as NEW books.
Hey its Lily, from the comment from 2016. I just suddenly remembered the hell Wisepenny caused me and did a quick search to see if Amazon let them stay in buisness… Seems like they are, except it appears that Wisepenny changed their buisness name to distance themselves from their years of horrible swindling, and they still appear to be book jacking on Amazon under the seller name “Moonlit City”. On Amazon’s seller central forum a user reported that Wisepenny had responded publicly to their negative review by revealing their home address, and that despite constantly contacting Amazon to get it removed, nothing was being done by either Amazon or Wisepenny. The thieves who owned Wisepenny and now its seemingly new iteration, somehow seem to fail to realize that not even the most legendary kings in history could hoard their money for all eternity despite their efforts.
No list of bookjackers would be complete without Fadime Akedmir of Nuzetal Books in Tallahassee.
Do you have any idea where they sell “their” books? I have received several orders from them on abebooks.com, and I have to ship all of them directly to the customer, always in the US. My guess is that they upgrade my listings (meaning: if I sell Good condition, they say is Very good). I’m very curious to understand how they do it.
In the case of the book that I wrote and published
https://www.amazon.co.uk/George-Markstein-Prisoner-Roger-Goodman/dp/0992905400
which had a hard cover signed and numbered limited first edition run of 500 (unlimited softback), “they” created a clone listing
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B01F9GD0Z6/
It took me ages to challenge and then report to Amazon all the bookjackers, who were attempting to sell my book at anything up to 20 times the original cover price!
In each case I demanded that the bookjacker send me a scan of the signed and numbered slip. When they could not do so, I asked them to take down their listing. Half, aware that they’d be rumbled, deleted their listing. A more aggressive half had to be pursued via Amazon, who, as others have noted, have a vested interest in not deleting such listings. I had to hammer home that only I sold the signed and numbered copies, so the bookjackers were falsely representing their items for sale on Amazon. Eventually they all retreated and we are left with my book listed on Amazon twice, but at least now with only genuine sellers.
The following is *not* a racist comment, but I frequently found that the replies from the bookjackers were written in very poor English and, unless this was deliberate to avoid lengthy Q&As, would suggest that they weren’t remotely interested in literature and books, but had merely found a form of scam with which to profiteer.
I still find it very strange… how would anybody buy a book that costs more within the same platform as the one listed originally? Unless they are upgrading and buying something lets say “good” and selling it as “very good”. I know they sell in UK but still trying to identify their account in the US. Everytime somebody participating in the Amazon seller forum mentions the term “dropshipper” the post gets deleted…
I think some of them find a title in one platform/website and list in another that doesn’t have any copies for sale. Or, as you say, change the condition, etc. In some cases the bookjackers might have better seller ratings, or SEO/ranking on the platform
I don’t think your average buyer shops around enough, especially if they’re purchasing for somebody else, a requested present, a book needed for a child at school, whatever. If they find what they’re looking for quickly – and bear in mind bookjackers can pay to have their book ‘priority’ listed on Amazon – then that’s sufficient, especially if the price is within budget. You and I would start with Bookfinder, but I doubt most people know of that site.
Unfortunately if you do a google search on a rare item, such as a given book or CD, whose Corporate name most often comes up first when that item is listed as available? Its Amazon’s; at very least its on the first page of the Google recommendations. I privilege eBay more these days, as for the most part you get a good description and pictures of the actual item you are buying. That most often is not the case on Amazon. In my opinion, if Amazon is honest, each seller should be forced to provide photographs of the actual item they are selling in the listing and tracked mailing. Those are currently optional for the seller; so open field is given to dropshippers to exploit the Market Place distribution model. In addition to over charging customers, and disappointing customers (when an item cannot be sourced by the seller and they tell you 3 weeks after taking your money that it was lost in the mail…), genuine Market Place resellers get lumped in and can’t be distinguished from the scammers at purchase time. So in summary, Amazon have 2 great tools to prevent customer disappointment, forced pictures in the listing of the actual product for sale; and optional mail with a tracking number (for the customer to decide if he wants to pay the extra).
I’m not sure if anyone has figured out why Amazon allows this. I’ll posit this. Double commissions. Amazon receives a commission from the bookjacker and also from the legitimate seller. It’s actually more than double since the legitimate seller sells for less than the bookjacker. Also Amazon routinely gives the Buy Box to bookjackers which gives them more credibility and there more sales. According to Amazon’s policy: “Example of drop shipping that is not permitted: Purchasing products from another online retailer and having that retailer ship directly to customers”. It’s obvious that they are violating their own policy and customer satisfaction for profit. This seems like an excellent 60 Minutes story or other news outlet expose if anyone here has connections. I’m sure this doesn’t only apply to books. These scumbag dropshippers have infested almost every area of Amazon. And what’s worse Amazon turns a blind eye.
I think you’ve nailed it.
Amazon doesn’t care about the double commissions. They are too small.
The whole bookjacking business is simply not big enough to be on Amazon’s radar yet. So what if a few hundred sales per day are fraudulent – maybe even a few thousand. That is nothing compared to Amazon’s 25 to 50 million sales per day.
Amazon just doesn’t care about something that is several places to the right of the decimal point.
The buy box is often owned by bookjackers because they have learned to manipulate the buy box algorithm. Amazon is not giving the buy box to bookjackers; rather the bookjackers are stealing it.
I think you book nerds need to find a better use of your time. If someone buys the book from you to dropship it, your getting your asking price, the customer is getting their item, and the third person/ the dropshipper is also making an honest living by using their arbitrage skills. Several of you mentioned they list the items on other sites where they are not currently listed. The bookjacker just helped promote and extend the reach of your product where it may have not been found if it wasn’t being dropshipped. Seriously, all of you dweebs get a life. It’s called capitalism. *mike drop*
Great points, except that they are not making an honest living. As you know if you read the post and comments above, the drop-shippers are deceiving their customers about who they are buying from, the condition of the items, and where the items are coming from. Moreover they are in fact in violation of Amazon’s stated policies, whether or not Amazon is enforcing the policies. Said policies are for the protection of consumers and honest dealers.
If you’re cool with fraud and deception in the name of capitalism, try not to let it bother you that people are drawing attention to unethical practices. Just understand capitalism is not carte blanche to deceive people; in fact capitalism presupposes informed consumers and rational actors. BTW it’s a “mic” not a “mike.” Read a book, nerd. 🙂
The fraud and deception is even worse than you describe. In the last several years, some bookjackers have started asking for refunds, claiming that the book never arrived or that it is not as described. Sometimes they say that they will drop the matter in return for a partial refund.
One of them tried this on me, and I was rather suspicious because the request was not made through Amazon’s proper channel for reporting missing packages. So I contacted the final customer ( I had his name and address, and it was easy to find him on Facebook ) and I asked him about the missing book. He said that he had received it, and had no complaints.
The bookjackers who are most often doing this are in some newcomers in Des Plains, Illinois, and our old friends in Richmond, Texas. There also appears to be several shadowy bookjackers operating out of Asia, but I can’t pin down names or locations.
For those sellers who want to avoid dealing with bookjackers, the solution is very easy: include an invoice. Put the total amount in big numbers, and circle it with a red pen.
Include your contact info ( email and phone ) on the invoice, with a pleasant, helpful paragraph about how happy you are to hear from customers if they have any problems or questions.
I do this, and about one in ten final customers contact me.
When they do, I tell them how they have been cheated, how to force the bookjacker to refund the excess, and how to avoid bookjackers in the future.
I have very few repeat bookjacking customers.
Thanks! Great tip!
Dear mikemonaco – until recent decades at least, it was generally a “mike” here in Britain. If you have a UK library card you can confirm this by looking up the Oxford English Dictionary which shows numerous printed examples of “mike” (for microphone) going back over 100 years and onwards to 1991, whereas “mic”, which in my opinion no normal logic would allow to be pronounced “mike”, has only appeared since the 1960s and I suspect is an American invention.
Someone once rebuked me for using the conventional spelling, but this is the first time I’ve looked it up and confirmed that I and XOXO are as correct as you and others who wish to take the mic.
Regards
Peter
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/117837?rskey=NgukMz&result=2#eid
Cheers,
micmonaco
That’s exactly what I said – OED shows it as not appearing till 1960s, unlike https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/118338
Yes, mic is the new mike. 😉
Hi,
I just had a transaction with GlassFrogBooks on Abebooks where I paid US$96.87 (Price US$ 91.38 and Sales Tax US$5.49). The book arrived from Amazon Warehouse with an invoice for US$64.90! I asked them for a refund of US$31.97 since they claimed there was a “clerical error”.
I am an attorney who used to work at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I have many recourses to GlassFrogBook’s scam. Charging more than an invoiced price is usually illegal, and is a bad business practice as well.
I strongly suggest reporting this activity to the FTC:
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/
It might give them a tool to whack Bezos and his illegal activities (e.g., anti-trust).
I will also go to my credit card company which is good at hitting fraudsters. Since the contact point is Abebooks, that means Amazon will have to address the matter.
I am interested that, as an attorney, you think fraud has been committed here. I would suggest that the invoice was made out to you by mistake and should have been made out to the buyer (Glass Frog – who are almost certainly NOT Amazon Warehouse) and not sent with the goods.
If you go in to Walmart you don’t expect to buy goods for the price Walmart paid for them, do you? In fact I’m sure you could buy, say, a washing machine, from some major retailer, and it would in fact come direct from the manufacturer, who had charged a lower price.
I’m not saying bookjacking is a good thing or ethical (I wouldn’t be on this thread if I was). $5 extra (finder’s fee) for your convenience in buying on your preferred site on which the item wasn’t otherwise listed might be ethical, but $32 seems steep. However it wouldn’t be steep if they had physically bought the book, would it?
They hadn’t physically bought the book. it was drop shipped form Amazon. Abe ended up giving me the difference, but still.
Glass Frog is one of the stores owned by Joshua Boos of Dallas. Google him.
Oof. I found this:https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/fake-stores-with-tens-of-thousands-books-all-with-texas-post-office-addresses-killing-prices/861178/53
I didn’t know the bookjackers are making it impossible to list books at reasonable prices too
Ooops. My bad. GlassFrogBooks is owned by David T. Sadler, not Joshua Boos.
GlassFrogBooks just changed their name. They are now GF Books.
I may have found one more: nuzetalbooks. The phone number is invalid.
You definitely found one more. Nuzetal books has been bookjacking for years. The guy behind it is Fadime Akdemir.
The king of bookjackers in 2021 is Joshua Boos of Dallas. He and his brother Johnathan own dozens of Amazon stores.
The bookjacker Joshua Boos uses the following names on Amazon
FrogCreekMedia
Bronze Classics
Old Yeller Books
cbobooks
Silver Ocean
Ridgeline Books and Media
RockMountainBooks
Cost-Cutters-R-US
NBSCA
Lucky’s Fulfillment
Orange Zebra
DaimondInTheRough
RedGooseMedia
Sandy Dunes Surplus <=== This is his biggest as of mid 2021
KnowledgePond <—– second largest in mid 2021
DeltaRiverBooks
vegasbooks
Twin City Rarities
Open Range Media
GlobalOnlineCo
acme_books
smiley_books
LiquidatorsDiscount
DFW Textbooks
Sunnyvale Bookstore
Diana Toy Store
AllPro Books
Great American Books and Art
turningnewleaf
Full Harvest
GoldieLoxBooks
Knowledge Cat
Texas Book Outlet
Gemstone Wisdom
LiquidatorsDiscount
Busy Bee Bookstore
Insights Library
All comments above much appreciated. Next time I’ll post my list of bookjackers, and “inferior-reprint mills”; thanks for others’ lists above, your lists will be very helpful here.
Bookjackers and “inferior-reprint mills” cost my small business a lot of money. The losses here are usually not the bookjackers’ inflated prices (in extreme cases approaching $900 for a book originally listed for e.g. $50); most of the annual losses here are from the frequent occasions when an Amazon “Sorry it’s late” turns out to be [Bookjacker relisted and sold to someone else]; hence the rapid-development project here, for which the old textbook book was needed, incurs a costly delay.
The “inferior-reprint mills” often pose as sellers of “Used, Like New”, “Used, As New”, or “Used, Very Good” textbooks, but they actually sell low-quality print-on-demand copies, in which equations, photos and graphs are basically illegible [hence the rapid-development project for which the authentic (legible) old textbook book was needed, incurs a costly delay].
On AbeBooks, the “inferior-reprint mills” appear even after filtering for “Used” AND “Not Printed-On-Demand”, but their deliveries take 3 weeks or so (reprint time), and the “old, used” textbooks books are very cheap (with bad spines, and illegible) brand-new low-quality reprints. When a customer is burned, they claim that that they sold a slightly-nicked copy purchased from “another seller” (perhaps across the hall?); so they remain legally untouchable.
My detailed, 1-star review of one of these toxic sellers on Amazon, disappeared into thin air a few days after posting, with no communication to me from Amazon (one of the posts above seems to give a plausible explanation, for the vanishing review, thanks!).
I had learned to avoid Glass Frog Books (always a costly scam in my experience), but today I found myself burned by GF Books, which indirectly led me to this web page, and to the post above stating that Glass Frog Books renamed itself GF Books.
Thanks to all who posted above; hope we can all find a way to navigate this.
I’m familiar with the inferior reprint mills too. Back in my public library days we often came across a couple of categories…in our case, we had standing orders with book jobbers for certain topics, and we got burned so often we had to start banning a bunch of “publishers” but it was like a whack-a-mole game, they kept re-emerging with different names.
One category was what you described: poor quality scans or low resolution prints of scans from early days of Archive.org and the Google Books projects. Barely legible, missing sections, crappy binding. Not very useful at all.
Another category was bound printouts of Project Gutenberg — either the plain .txt files (lacking all illustrations, with random typos, floating numbers in the text representing page numbers from the original, etc.) or printouts of the sketchy PDFs, with lots of Optical Character Recognition fails. These were sometimes represented as new editions, or facsimiles, etc.
Lastly there were the pretend new book publishers, who were running a scam that targets people seeking information on various subjects. It didn’t impact the used book trade but really hurt the Library in the form of wasted money from those standing orders. The publishers would simply aggregate Wikipedia articles, usually with no citation or acknowledgement. We kept a few figuring there was some research value to seeing a “snapshot” of the articles from the time they were gathered. This soon gave way to a much more insidious scam: algorithmic paraphrases of Wikipedia articles. These seemed to be processed through some kind of thesaurus program. I don’t have any examples handy but the resulting text was not quite gibberish, it just read like a really bad high school research paper. It became nearly criminal, in my opinion, when these were printed on health topics, since the paraphrase program was substituting synonyms or related words in situations that could completely change the meaning. (Real example: a “book” of diabetes randomly switching around “sugar”, “glucose”, “fructose”, and related terms, and using bizarre neologisms like “insulin acceptance” for “insulin tolerance”, etc.) I assume they did this to keep readers (and plagiarism software) from detecting the fact that these are just Wikipedia articles from sample text.
Lastly some mills reprinted government publications — technically legal since it is public domain but again misrepresented and often very out of date or superceded.
It was very frustrating to think of all the wasted money and effort at the Library over these scams. And as far as I know there they never faced any real vonsequences from Amazon, the book vendors, etc.
Thanks for your informative insights. I had underestimated what already seemed a serious problem. The diabetes “book” example is heartbreaking. I’ll be more proactive in the future. I don’t quite know what to do, but every now and then an opportunity seems to arise.
You mentioned: “Lastly some mills reprinted government publications…”
We were burned by two of the mills who reprint (among other things) government documents (wasted payment for each illegible document was small compared to cost of delay in the associated quick-turn development project).
I later learned that one of those mills was under investigation by a government entity (not all government documents are free of e.g. contractor IP). Consistent with your observation above, that mill still misrepresents and publishes government documents; but it hasn’t been all that long, and (Sun Tzu): “Wheels of justice grind slow but grind fine”.
Sorry to hear about impacts on the Library; hard to imagine the ripple effect of lost staff time, on critical needs that libraries uniquely serve.
Thanks for hosting this site. I noticed “Attila” (Nic Fields, Osprey) in “Reviews”; then found a 1st edition 1st printing copy; also loved “…Lead rot by any other name”; excellent conservation research.
As of March 2022, the Boos Brothers of Dallas are now doing business as AndersonBookFamily
The Boos brothers have apparently found a gullible accountant who lets them use his address and name as a front. He is Jagan Mohan Vinukula Vinukonda at 8100 Gaylord Pkwy, Apt 1121, Frisco,Texas.
The Boos brothers are now out of business.
So the biggest bookjackers now are Ergode books and their minions in Hackensack, Rutherford, Lyndhurst, and other parts of New Jersey.
Their most frequently used addresses are PO boxes at the Post Office at 156 Park Ave in Rutherford and the Post Office at 560 Hulyer Street in Hackensack.
They keep changing post office boxes to avoid being traced.
The Boos brothers have reincarnated one of their accounts. They are bookjacking again on Amazon as Silver Arrow Bookstore in McKinney, Texas.