Is there a reliable place to buy paper books online these days? I've received fake books from both flipkart and amazon. People are printing pdfs on A4 paper and then making a book out of it. Hence books are not in correct dimensions(smaller) and very hard to read. Defeating the entire purpose of buying a paper book.

Is the rating of the seller not helpful?

@quick-tent-39442 Nope. Received a fake from a 4.1 seller.

I have never received a fake book from Amazon. Been buying books for years. Recently bought a book which has many publishers printing it (How to win friends …) and the paper quality could have been better but it cost 160 bucks - so can't complain much. (There is even a cheaper version selling for 99 bucks with worse reviews). Can you give an example of a book (link) that you got a pirated copy of? Return the book and get it from another seller. Also, for the purpose of research, can you share which city you are based out of? I am wondering if it is a local warehousing issue. I am from Pune.

@loud-glass-33663 it was Designing data-intensive applications. Book was small. Page size was half of A4. Price was printed in dollars so most certainly not an Indian edition.

Seller ratings don't matter because amazon uses "cross-inventory" wherein a product can be sourced from other seller's stock if the current seller runs out of stock. So, you can end up with fakes even when buying from a legit seller. This has been discussed widely on HackerNews. They hate amazon with a passion :p

Got it. That book is retailing for 1600 which is quite expensive for an Indian Subcontinent version. So probably attracts folks to such expensive technical books. 🤔

I haven't faced this issue much. Talking about that specific book, I bought it from Shroff Publishers for 1600 Rs. Book was genuine.

@faint-energy-11966 I didn't know that. TIL. @loud-glass-33663 Yeah. It's expensive for an Indian edition. Something weird with this book. My Core Java Books by Horstmann came at about 600 each. @mysterious-yak-23452 IIRC, Shroff is the one who have publishing rights of O'Reilly books. It should be mentioned in the initial pages of the book. If you have the book, Can you please confirm it? Didn't know about site. I'll check that out. thanks.

@lemon-knife-94497 I am travelling and do not have book with me. But yes, it seems that they have the rights.

@mysterious-yak-23452 oh ok. Never mind then.