What Matt Harrison's Blog Says About Amazon's Book Piracy Problem

Updated

Matt Harrison's Blog (hairysun.com) argues that Amazon tolerates book piracy and that this tolerance works against authors' interests. The blog's post "Amazon's Book Piracy Problem" opens with a blunt TLDR: Amazon turns a blind eye toward book piracy, and a cynical reading is that it does so to line its own pocketbooks. The post is the author's opinion and analysis rather than a report of a formal investigation, so treat the claims as a starting point for your own check of Amazon's policies and author reports.

The core claim

The post frames the issue around a simple question: why would the world's largest book marketplace encourage piracy? Harrison's answer is that a "shady side of Amazon" is at work and that it is "the bane of book authors everywhere." In his view, the harm lands on authors, while the marketplace benefits.

"Gaming the system"

The blog follows up with a second post, "Gaming the system," which extends the argument by describing how the system encourages piracy. Read together, the two posts present a sequence: Amazon's handling of pirated books, then the mechanisms that let piracy persist. The excerpt available from the site does not detail those mechanisms, so go to the full posts if you need the specific examples Harrison cites.

What the blog is

hairysun.com is Matt Harrison's personal blog. Its headings also include "Announcing Effective Pandas," "You Wrote Another Pandas Book?" and "What is the best free course?", which places the author in the Python and pandas technical-book space. That background matters for reading the piracy posts: the concern is a working author's concern about his own market.

How to use this

  • If you want the author's argument, read "Amazon's Book Piracy Problem" first, then "Gaming the system" as the follow-up.
  • If you need evidence for a decision about selling on Amazon, use the posts as one author's perspective and check Amazon's current policies and other authors' accounts.
  • If you are looking for the blog's technical content, the pandas-related posts are separate from the piracy discussion.