Amazon Idiocy

Jean Follain, Paris 1935, trans. Kathleen Shields, had an excellent half-page review in the TLS last month. On Amazon, the text accompanying the cover image reads as follows:

Immerse in captivating narratives and enrich mind with our latest book collection. Explore diverse genres, from thrilling mysterles to heartwarming romances, ensuring there's something for every reader. With engaging plots and vivid characters, these books promise to transport to new worlds and inspire imagination.

Similar bot-generated nonsense appears on pages for some other CBe titles.

Some CBe titles are not listed on Amazon at all. Some are listed in the wrong category (not Books). When a CBe title is listed, it can be hard to find: when I type an author’s name into the Amazon search box, their CBe titles often do not appear (but their titles from other publishers do); but when I type in the author’s name plus book title, a listing does sometimes appear. And here’s an odd one: I type in a CBe author’s name and a book with the same title as the one they have written appears but it is a completely different book, by another author; the book by the CBe author is not listed at all.

Random other idiocies: for example, the CBe edition of Leila Berg’s Flickerbook is not listed at all, but the cover image of the CBe book is being used to sell a Kindle edition of the book not published by CBe. And if you thought buying from Amazon means you get a book cheap, that is often not true: a CBe title with a cover price of £12 is selling from Amazon at £35.51; another with a cover price of £8.99 is selling from Amazon at £46.38, and another at £33.17.

If you do manage to find a CBe title on Amazon, the information is often inadequate or misleading. One reason for this is that I have only a basic account with Nielsen, the UK central book data place from which Amazon takes its info. But even if I upgrade my account with Nielsen, the formatting limitations on the way I can input information (e.g., review quotes) make the text barely readable when fed through to Amazon.

Many other small presses are treated by Amazon in the same way and CBe is far from alone in having these problems. Today I was told that “if you don’t have your own vendor account and are distributed by Gardners (and therefore operating through theirs), there is currently a known technical issue whereby the two systems aren’t aligned and it’s causing issues to certain publishers’ feeds, despite those feeds coming from third party Nielsen.”

A vendor account! That might give me (some) control of the contents of the listings! But that’s not going to happen because (a) you have to be invited, you can’t simply apply; and (b) even if they did invite me they wouldn’t let me in through the door because CBe is not a registered company and I couldn’t give them the legal and financial details they require.

Because Amazon treats the information on CBe titles supplied to it with utter contempt, and because Amazon is not fit for (my) purpose, I want out. But cannot get out, because for a book to have an ISBN I have to register it with Nielsen, and Amazon captures that info from Nielsen. Solutions … De-couple Nielsen and Amazon? Nationalise Amazon? Or should I simply not bother with ISBNs and not register with Nielsen? (Thereby making the books available only from the website.)