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Old 06-25-2010, 12:18 PM   #1
boswd
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Does Amazon go overboard with padding the number of titles it has

when counting single titles for it's e-books that it has multiple times.

First off I do like to point out they ALL do it. It's the oldest trick in the book to "pad" your specs, if you will. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple etc.

So when people start spewing "Well Amazon or whoever has such and such many titles" you really do have to take it with a grain of salt.

iTunes and Amazon Mp3 and WalMart Mp3 have been doing this for a while. Punch in Steppin Wolf's Born to be Wild and you'll get see it listed about 10 or more times.

so it's only natural that the ebook sellers will do the same, You know the Larger the Number the more impressive. The biggest and most common abuse of this in the public domain books.

But does Amazon go waaaaaaaaaaaay too far?

for example I punched in Pride and Prejudice on both BN and Amazon, on BN it came up with about 4 titles. all the same book Punched it in on Amazon and it came up around 12 titles of the same book each one realy no different than the rest.

I then punched in bram strokers Dracula. BN I do believe was about 10 or so , Amazon I had to stop counting at 22. it just kept going on and on. I wasn't counting collections of stories, or collection of Bram strokes books, just Dracula. There was seriously no end in sight on Amazon. so IOW's though Dracula is one title it is counted as about 50 titles and included in the overall number of titles as 50 instead of 1.

But it will count each one as a separate title.

Again Yes EVERYONE does this to pad their numbers, but doesn't Amazon take it a tad bit tooo far?

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Old 06-25-2010, 12:39 PM   #2
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The problem is they allow merchants to create SKU entries and the merchants aren't trained as librarians and often have a business model which depends on their product being listed separately from some other pretty much identical product.

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Old 06-25-2010, 01:00 PM   #3
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The problem is they allow merchants to create SKU entries and the merchants aren't trained as librarians and often have a business model which depends on their product being listed separately from some other pretty much identical product.

William
What's worse is that each book *is* different, in that a hardcover will have a different ISBN (and possibly LCCN) than the mass-market paperback version and the ebook version. Plus, in the case of older editions that have been re-released, there may well be additional matter such as new forewords. Clearly these are different books. I've got five different copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" sitting on my bookshelves. One is a larger-print, two volume edition, one has an expanded preface and two forewords, another has an afterword by Leonard Piekoff(sp?)... you get the idea.

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Old 06-26-2010, 09:39 AM   #4
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The B&N store goes overboard, the count all of Google's pre-1923 books in their store count when they really only have about 200,000 in copyright works.
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Old 06-26-2010, 09:43 AM   #5
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What do you expect them to do?

If I have the "Penguin Classics" and the "Oxford World Classics" editions of "King Solomon's Mines" on my bookshelf (which, as it happens, I do) then I have two books, not one. The fact that they contain the same story doesn't alter the fact that they are distinct books.
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Old 06-27-2010, 07:16 AM   #6
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What do you expect them to do?

If I have the "Penguin Classics" and the "Oxford World Classics" editions of "King Solomon's Mines" on my bookshelf (which, as it happens, I do) then I have two books, not one. The fact that they contain the same story doesn't alter the fact that they are distinct books.


yes but it's still only One title. King soloomone Mines. I'm not saying only they should only sell one copy but when a company advertises how many titles they offer in order to get you to used theim, it's more of an advertising gimmick that is meant to give you the "impression" that they have x amount of "different" titles not 70 titles of the same story.

see what I mean.

and yes they all do it, Amazon, BN, all of them. But it just seems to me that Amazon kind of goes overboard with this inorder to say "WE have x amount of titles"
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Old 06-27-2010, 07:27 AM   #7
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They are different books, though. They have different introductions, different footnotes, etc.
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Old 06-27-2010, 07:33 AM   #8
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They are different books, though. They have different introductions, different footnotes, etc.


I guess, it's a bit of a stretch though . I mean you can have 100 different copies, with 100 slightly different annotations or , what have nots it still doesn't change the fact it's still just one title.
Think of it like this. Let's say I have 40 copies of Watership Down, ranging from hard cover, paperback, 1st edition. re release edition penguins edition, so forth and so forth.
And I adverstise to people. "Come buy books from me, at my home, I have over 70 titles to choose from. " So people come to my home to buy some books but only to see that over 50% of them are all Watership Down, and I say, "No these are different, this one is a trade paperback, this one is a standard paperback, this one has a new forward."

see what I'm getting at?

I'm sort of an electronic gadget junkie and you see padded specs throughout the industry, battery life, contrast ratio in HDTV's, number of titles for e-books stores. so on and so on
It just kind of drives me crazy . I guess it's just me

Last edited by boswd; 06-27-2010 at 07:39 AM.
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Old 06-27-2010, 07:40 AM   #9
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I do agree that when you have 20 different versions of "Pride and Prejudice", all created from exactly the same Project Gutenberg source, all equally badly formatted, and with nothing to choose between them, then that really is "padding". But that's why Amazon have banned the uploading of such books by individuals.
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