Books are a huge nightmare. Especially older books - search results are completely flooded and dominated by poor-quality fly-by-night print-on-demand publishing "companies" that take bad OCRs or even worse and reprint them. Making matters worse, reviews for different editions (including electronic editions!), publishers, and translations are all conflated!
This makes it impossible to ascertain anything about the quality and nature of the book you are actually buying - you might read ten reviews complaining about the translation, only none of them are actually about the translation you're looking at - you have no way of knowing unless they happen to mention it in the review you're looking at. You might read many reviews about very poor binding - but is it from the publisher you're looking at? No clue!
This isn't even getting onto the counterfeit issue you mention.
Another huge problem is translations between versions. An example of this is the paperback and hardcover versions of a book being well-translated by person X, but the Kindle version being a poor translation done by person Y. All of these will be on the same "book" page, even though they're fundamentally different.
I love my kindle, but translation + kindle is an awful experience.
I recently ordered from Powell's and was shocked at just how good the packing job is. They basically shrink-wrap your books to a thick piece of cardboard to prevent damage. With Amazon, I don't think I've ever gotten a book without a bit of damage.
I agree. I stupidly ordered a copy of Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier from Amazon and it just arrived yesterday, and the back cover was all bent along the edge because they did a terrible job of packing it.
Yes. Especially when most of the physical books I do order from Amazon are hardcover photography coffee table books. Probably at least half get sent back for obvious damage, and I could go more if I was even more picky.
