Fall 2006 (Vol.VII, No. 2)

Table of Contents

• From the editor

• The Bane of the Online Book World: Mega-Listers

• Plagiarism and Online Bookselling

• Defining Mega-Listers

• Megalisters: Big and Online

• Mega-Lister Questionnaire

• An Interview with Mike Goodenough

• Books, Books Everywhere, But Not a Page to Read, or, a Book Dealer’s Travels in Spain

• Ephemeral Assays: Herbarium Symposium

• Book Reviews The Art of the Book & Beauty and the Book

• Book Review: Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia by Anton Gerits

• How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Teaching at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar

• The Boot Camp for Book Dealers

• Joe Perlman of Mostly Useful Fictions

• Marc Monsarrat of Bookmarc Books, Malahat, British Columbia

• John Hardy of Hardy Books, Nevada City, California

• Addendum

• Ye Old Booksellers: Forty Years Among the Old Booksellers of Philadelphia

The Bane of the Online Book World: Mega-Listers

Readers of this journal have probably seen it happen again and again: while hunting the internet for a particular used book, you find a number of reasonably priced copies offered from various dealers, then two or three priced at ridiculously high amounts. Sometimes, if the book is fairly common, you find dozens of copies with prices unbelievably out of whack.

You may ask yourself, What is going on here? You take a closer look. Here’s a copy priced three times higher than every other. Here’s another copy from the same dealer, four times higher. You read the descriptions, looking for something special about these books, but there’s nothing to recommend them—they’re not limited editions, collectible firsts, signed, or in fine bindings. Is this dealer insane?

The high standards for which used bookdealers have been known and respected for centuries did not disappear with the advent of the World Wide Web; they moved out onto the internet. In the late 1990s, purchasing a used book online was a joy. Problems or complaints, though rare, were handled with integrity by dealers who took pride in their reputation for honesty.

But those innocent days are over. It took only a few years from the time the web became the hot new place for commerce until the first book mega-lister set up shop online. That was somewhere around 2001. In the past two years these despicable con artists have mushroomed out of all control.

Every legitimate bookseller that sells online is negatively impacted by mega-listers. Every time a customer is duped by a mega-lister it throws suspicion on every honest dealer. Victims of these con artists become wary of internet commerce. They stop shopping at the site where they got duped and may even give up purchasing antiquarian books online altogether.

There are a lot of names for these opportunistic frauds: fake listers, hollow listers, cabbage sellers, data pilferers. The most common term is mega-lister, which encompasses all their various shady operating methods under one easy label.

How does a mega-lister operate? Let’s take a look at the original mega-lister, a notorious character whom we shall call Justin.

Sometime around the year 2000, this bright but misguided Californian teen came up with a clever business scheme to rake in thousands of bucks with almost no work. Representing himself as a wholly owned subsidiary of a Dunn and Bradstreet credit rated company, he telephoned small used book stores around the country and offered them what he thought would be an easy sell: ship us your books and we will sell them online for you, at a commission of seventy percent, plus storage. Despite taking that huge cut his fledgling business failed rapidly. His new scheme was even more insidious.

In 2001, our intrepid youth came back to the internet as a used bookdealer with a seemingly massive inventory. With prices out of all proportion to the market, Justin set up shop on Amazon.com and began taking orders for used and rare books. The trouble was that he had no physical inventory; or if he did, it was nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of books he claimed.

Justin had apparently devised a software program to scrape the internet for listings of used and rare books. His program captured all the information including the price. When he had compiled a list of several thousand books, he relisted them under his own name but jacked up the prices by a factor of two, three, four or more. When an order came in, he would contact the dealer whose catalog entry he had stolen and, without revealing the true situation to the dealer, purchase the book and have it drop-shipped to his own customer. The dealer who had done the original job of finding and listing the item—whose dedicated research and delicate prose caused it to sell—was invisible to the buyer, for drop-shipping requires that the customer see only Justin’s name on the package and that nothing revealing the original dealer or the real price be enclosed.

Some might insist that Justin has done nothing wrong. This is just a new type of book-search service, some argue. The dealer whose catalog entry was stolen is getting free advertising and selling a book in the bargain. But mega-listers are not the same as legitimate book-search services, which communicate openly that they do not have the book in hand. Mega-listers commit copyright violation, deception, and fraud on a massive scale. They are selling things they don’t own and don’t have a right to sell.

Legitimate book-search services tell you they will try to locate your book and, when found, will quote to you a price. At that point you can turn it down or say yes. When you engage a search service you agree in advance to pay a small fee which will be added to the price at the close of the transaction. Search services do not charge you for the book before they have found it (although they may require a small, refundable deposit). They do not pretend to have a warehouse of books. They do not provide catalog descriptions without acknowledging that the words are from another dealer who has the book in hand. Legitimate search services work from want-lists; they do not scrape the net for descriptions and then wait for an interested buyer to stumble along. Mega-listers do all these things and more.

What mega-listers and their defenders might not know is that on top of the fraud and piracy they are committing, data scraping itself has been prohibited by law in 1998 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which “criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright.” (Source: Wikipedia.org.)

Another trick in the mega-lister’s arsenal is to copy the catalog of Books-in-Print (BIP) and use it as their fake inventory. Any bookdealer with experience in new books knows how quickly a book “in print” might become permanently unavailable. There are always a large number of titles in the BIP already out of print. But mega-listers, in their ignorance, will greedily upload the entire BIP under their own name. Orders fly in but many they are unable to fill. Hapless customers find their credit cards charged, their orders cancelled, and refunds a sometimes iffy pursuit.

For every customer pleased with their purchase from a mega-lister there are others who are angry at having been ripped off. Some of these victims receive wildly misdescribed books, as mega-listers steal the data but never see or touch the book. They may copy the description of a Very Good or Fine listing and then fill the order with a specimen that is in reality barely above Poor. Some would-be buyers find their orders cancelled days or even weeks later: the mega-lister can’t fulfill the order but rather than reveal the scam simply cancels it and moves on.

How do the major portals—ABE, Alibris, Amazon—handle these unethical firms? As far as this writer can tell, they encourage them.

Each of the “Big A” portals gains a commission on every sale. There is no incentive for them to boot mega-listers. Operators of these portals may even believe that the number of customers and legitimate dealers they lose by hosting these con artists is negligible.

On the other hand, eBay has strict rules against these nefarious practices. The site specifically prohibits a seller from copying “a substantial amount of another member’s description and pasting it into a listing.” Copying someone else’s images is also prohibited. Penalties range from cancellation of the listing to suspension of the seller’s account. When mega-listers are revealed, eBay seems to police them well.

But on the “Big A’s,” mega-listers are running wild and causing havoc. These giant used-book portals are clogged with millions of fake listings from dozens of mega-listers. It is increasingly difficult on these sites to find legitimate dealers with real books in stock.

Justin alone set up more than thirty seller names on Amazon, multiplying his fake inventory into more than nine million listings, and while it appears he’s no longer in the market, many other unscrupulous outfits are aggressively following his business plan. This exponential expansion of fake listings not only overloads the host site but pushes aside the listings of legitimate dealers who list only what they have in stock. Since 2004, I and others have identified over fifty mega-listers selling under more than 110 names on the “Big A’s.”

Yet another issue involves the status of truly rare books. Let’s say Justin’s fake inventory includes a particularly rare title. By listing it thirty times it appears that there are many, many copies available where there is actually only one—or perhaps none. This wildly distorts the perceived availability of that title and may even cause the price for that title to plummet. This form of fraud runs akin to maliciously causing another person’s property to drop in value.

Used books are like snowflakes: no two specimens are exactly the same. A highly valuable, extremely rare book may require hours of research on the part of the dealer in order to write a description that honestly represents the item’s physical features and flaws as well as its historical or literary significance. A mega-lister who copies that description is not only committing fraud but plagiarism as well.

How can one identify a mega-lister? It takes a little savvy and a little time but there are many ways.

1. Feedback. On sites where there is a feedback or reliability rating system (Amazon, Alibris, eBay), look for a measurable amount of negative feedback. Mega-listers tend to generate complaints from 5 to 10 percent of their customers, and sometimes their negative feedback is as high as 50 percent.

2. Boilerplate descriptions. Click on the link to view the seller’s inventory. If you see the same bland, uninformative description on every item, be wary of a mega-lister. Examples from actual mega-listers: “May have some underlining, highlighting, and/or margin notes.” “My copy of this item is in typical used, acceptable condition or better.” “Average condition for its age.” “Books are brand new and shipped directly from the publisher’s warehouse.”

3. No condition grades. Where the item’s condition would be described, there is instead a stream of inane marketing verbiage. Some actual examples: “All of our items ship within 24 hours!” “Over 2 million customers served!” “These are very good books from talented authors and would make a great books [sic] to read on those chilly winter days or as an addition to anyone’s littery [sic] collection.”

4. Every book under the sun. Start at a portal’s homepage and run a search for a few common terms, such as author: Jones, title: cooking. When you have a page of results, run your eye over the bookstore names that show up. When you see the same bookstore name over and over again, it is very likely you have found a mega-lister who has uploaded the BIP as their “inventory.”

5. Whacky prices. Set up a search as above and order the results by highest price first. The mega-listers tend to be the ones listing $3 paperbacks for $75 or $100. They will show up at the top of the list. Sometimes their insane prices are an artifact of how their software is programmed. I found one mega-lister with over 100,000 titles with prices all over the map but nothing between $40 and $180. Another had an apparent minimum price. I stopped looking after the first 300 items—they were all exactly $6.27.

6. Huge inventories. Imagine the space needed to store 100,000 books. When you see a seller with numbers that high, be wary. But please note that not every dealer with a huge inventory is a mega-lister. Zubal Books of Cleveland has over 150,000 items; Powell’s of Portland, Oregon has over 1,100,000; these are major operations that do indeed have large amounts of inventory.

7. Ask questions. One clever method is to contact the suspected mega-lister and ask a question that can’t be answered unless the book is in hand. “Does the book have any writing or underlining in it?” you might ask. Or make up a non-sequitur question to see if they lie. “Is this the edition with a preface by Sir Walter Scott?” If they cannot answer your question, or their answer is obviously phony, or you get no reply at all, be wary.

What can one do about mega-listers?

1. Keep track of them. When you spot a mega-lister, jot down their name(s) and keep the list where you won’t lose it.

2. Don’t sell to them. Don Gallagher of The Gallagher Collection, Denver, recently reported, “I had an order for one of our books that, alas, could not be found. Told the customer and he wrote back: ‘You’ve got to have it. I’ve already sold it on eBay.’ I went from miserable to ecstatic, and put the jackass on my ‘Don’t Sell To’ list.”

3. Report them. Your complaint to the host website might not get them booted right away, but it will be added to other complaints and at some point the sheer number of registered complaints will perhaps get them removed and may even encourage them to get out of the business.

4. Warn others. When you find a mega-lister, let your fellow bookdealers know. Customers too will appreciate being informed which dealers are, shall we say, a little shady.

5. Support sites that prohibit mega-listers. As much as possible, shop at the “small” multi-dealer sites which, in most cases, show a much greater willingness to police mega-listers and boot them when necessary.

6. 
   

Gwen Foss operates Alan’s Used Books out of Farmington, MI and can be contacted at http://www.tomfolio.com/shop/AlansUsedBooks.

Plagiarism and Online Bookselling

You were warned about it at all levels of your education, and students are expelled from colleges and universities for doing it. You have read about it in the style manuals you used in your education or workplace. In recent years, you have probably heard about historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, who were shamed by accusations of plagiarism and proofs of their guilt. And there are many other cases of less famous academics, novelists, and other authors who have plagiarized and been caught, damaging their reputations irreparably.

Plagiarism is the representation of someone else’s words as one’s own. In the context of online bookselling, it is the copying of part or all of a book’s description from another bookseller or other source without attribution—thus representing it falsely as one’s own work. “Lying” and “stealing” are blunter ways of putting it.

One of the most disturbing aspects about discussions on plagiarism is the number of booksellers who do not see the problem. So let us make clear from the start that it is wrong. It is unethical, sloppy, lazy, a professional “no-no,” and sometimes illegal. And if you are an offender and none of that bothers you, it is also against the rules of all major bookselling sites and can lead to your entire catalogue being suspended or withdrawn permanently.

The exact wording varies from site to site, but this excerpt from the ABE Code of Conduct will suffice to demonstrate the nature of plagiarism: “Stealing bookseller information (such as descriptions, pictures, and images from other booksellers’ listings).” As ABE makes clear, such violations will lead to suspension and, if the violations are not resolved, a permanent ban. Sites with high ethical standards will be reluctant to readmit such an offender and even large listing sites take a strong stand on plagiarism, once it has been pointed out.

Augustine Funnell of Fredericton, Canada has been plowing a lonely furrow against plagiarism for some time and is delighted to see IOBA looking into this matter. Gus suffers more than most—his descriptions are very good, the result of painstaking research and an encyclopedic knowledge, and are therefore more liable to be copied than other less erudite entries. Understandably, he gets—to use his own words—“pissed off!”

Then comes the next strange thing—when the offending booksellers are notified, instead of saying “Oops, sorry, I’ll put it right,” many retort rudely or belligerently. Only when forced to comply by the threat of, or actual, suspension do they finally do something about it.

Some booksellers, of course, plagiarize from ignorance (though there really is little excuse for not having read the Code of Conduct when joining a site, or being unaware of the general concept of plagiarism), but most seem to do it out of sheer selfishness or laziness—a lamentable disregard for their bookselling colleagues, not to mention their own reputations as booksellers.

Most examples of plagiarism are found by accident when checking one’s own entries. Once a bookseller has found an example, it can be instructive to check on the offending dealer. Sometimes a serial plagiarist will be found, worth reporting to IOBA! One way to check for plagiarized listings is to examine some of the offender’s listings and pick one of the lengthy descriptions. Copy a section of that description and paste it into the keyword panel of a suitable general bookselling site such as BookFinder, AddAll or ABE. If the description is stolen, it will soon show up in another bookseller’s listing.

It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to examine and learn from the descriptions of other booksellers as part of basic research on a book, but that should be the absolute limit. Once having crossed that line by copying and then pasting into one’s own entry, the offender is stealing and deserves any sanctions that come his way.

There are some gray areas:

How much copied text constitutes plagiarism? Must it be the entire description? A paragraph? What about a single sentence? A clever turn of phrase? A single, well-chosen word?

What about factual bibliographic information about the book being described, such as the list of contributors in an anthology, the list of titles in a set of books being offered, or a long title or subtitle?

What about copying a citation to a reference source if you haven’t seen it yourself?

What about ideas, such as X being one of the most important scholars in a given field?

How much paraphrasing is needed to “fix” plagiarism?

What about copying text from a dust jacket blurb, with or without attribution?

Is ignorance an acceptable excuse for plagiarism?

Common sense answers most of these questions but none of these issues will arise if a bookseller does not do any kind of “borrowing” from another bookseller’s listing or other source, without proper attribution. There are any number of reasons why one bookseller might copy part or all of another’s description, but there isn’t a single good one among them. Not even flattery or as a tribute to the original writer. Plagiarism is simply the brazen theft of the fruits of someone else’s labour, and no different from one person scrimping and saving enough money to buy a car, only to have a stranger drive it away.

If a bookseller believes that plagiarism is inconsequential, then he must also believe that he himself has no right to anything he has worked for, or to which he has committed time and effort. And if a bookseller cares so little about the ethics of this profession, he is better off out of it, and the profession is most certainly better off without him. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “A thief is a thief is a thief.”

Stuart Manley operates Barter Books in Alnwick Station, Northumberland, England and can be contacted at http://www.barterbooks.co.uk.

Steve Harter operates Sweet Beagle Books out of Bloomington, IN and can be contacted at http://www.sweetbeagle.com.