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Mega-Listers by Gwen Foss
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Mega-lister is a new name for a class of fraudulent "booksellers" now operating online. How they operate, how to spot them, and what to do about them.
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Sometimes, when you look online at used books being offered by various dealers, you find a number of reasonably priced copies along with two or three priced at ridiculously high amounts. Sometimes, if the book is fairly common, you might find dozens of copies with prices unbelievably out of whack.
Why are these copies priced so high? 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. Are these dealers insane?
Unfortunately, it took only a few years from the time the web became the hot new place for commerce until the first fraudulent "bookseller" set up shop online. That was sometime around 2001. By 2004 there were hundreds of these despicable con artists infesting the web.
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 2001, this bright but misguided California teen came up with a clever business scheme to rake in thousands of bucks with almost no work. 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. The dealer whose catalog entry was stolen is getting free advertising and selling a book in the bargain. But legitimate book-search services work from want-lists. They do not pretend to have a warehouse of books. They do not operate on 1000% markups. 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.
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.
Each of the major internet portals gains a commission on every sale. Thus there is no incentive for them to boot mega-listers. The one exception is eBay, which has strict rules against these nefarious practices. But on the other major portals--Amazon, Abe, Alibris--fraudulent "booksellers" are running wild and causing havoc. These websites are clogged with millions of fake listings from hundreds 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. He apparently went out of business by 2006 although he may have simply changed his online identity and continued to operate.
Many unscrupulous outfits today are still aggressively following Justin's business plan. Since 2004, I and others have identified over 400 mega-listers selling under more than 600 different names.
(For my current list of known mega-listers, email me at the address on my Contact Us page.)
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How can I identify a mega-lister?
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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 entire 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. For example: 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.
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What can I do about mega-listers?
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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. If you are a dealer, don't sell to them.
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.
5. Support sites that prohibit mega-listers. As much as possible, shop at TomFolio.com and other "small" multi-dealer sites which show a much greater willingness to police mega-listers and boot them when necessary.
Gwen Foss operates Alan's Used Books out of Farmington, Michigan.
Another excellent but brief article on mega-listers
New York Times article on mega-listers
List of common excuses used by mega-listers who are unable to fulfill an order
This page is a reduced version of The Bane of the Online Book World: Mega-Listers, by Gwen Foss, originally published in the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) Standard, 2006. It has been shortened a bit and updated. Thanks to Shawn Purcell, editor of the IOBA Standard, for asking me to write this article way back when.
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