A 2011 thriller was originally set to sell for $15. A businessman priced it at $987, and was published in the 17th century. This is what happens in a market where third-party sellers are running wild.

While wandering in the Amazon bookstore, John C. Boland saw the scientific thriller "Primitive Man" sold at dizzying prices. Sandy Dunes Surplus is priced at US$907, Rocky Mountain Books is priced at US$930, and Open Range Media is priced at US$987.

He does not need a copy. He wrote this novel and published it himself. The list price is $15.

Mr. Boland has been selling books on Amazon since 2009. He asked the bookseller to handle everything for his imprint, called the "perfect crime", including printing, billing, and shipping.

"The best retailer on earth," he called it. "They eat lunch for the game."

Despite this support, Mr. Boland sued Amazon at the end of August, accusing the devouring retailer of essentially eating the lunch of perfect crime. His lawsuit alleges that Amazon made Sandy Dunes and other vendors on its platform go crazy with the "perfect crime" game, providing copies at absurd prices. The seller also curiously asserted that "Primitive Man" was published in 1602, only 409 years after its actual release, which further angered the author.

This lawsuit filed in federal court in Maryland gives us a glimpse into Amazon's dominance and vulnerability. Amazon's online store has surpassed Wal-Mart to become the largest retailer outside of China. By providing necessities and luxuries to those trapped at home during the pandemic, it helped many people pass a bleak moment. The transportation time that used to be calculated in days is now calculated in hours. It is one of the few companies with a valuation of more than one trillion U.S. dollars.

However, despite these successes, Amazon still faces pressure from multiple sources.

There are sellers like Mr. Boland who say they are affected by the wild west atmosphere on the site; regulators are paying close attention to the strength of Amazon; dissatisfied warehouse employees who want better deals; and legislators, they Hope that Amazon will disclose more information about its third-party sellers. There are also cunning sellers themselves, and Amazon says it is difficult to eradicate these sellers.

Perhaps all these key groups can be dealt with. But there is a greater risk: customers. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once pointed out, customers are "very dissatisfied." Last quarter, they became fickle to Amazon. After years of rapid growth, its e-commerce revenue has hardly changed.

Maybe this is a flash in the pan. Or, the shopper may put away the wallet in frustration.

"Amazon was originally a bookstore, but now it's a marketplace—an e-commerce bucket where any seller can put their stuff in," said Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant. "The result is that the shopping experience really got worse over time."

The bookstore is the oldest part of Amazon. It is still the core of its identity, but it is no longer its bottom line. It feels like where every Amazon shopping experience might go-huge, full of advertisements and uncensored reviews, controlled by algorithms and third-party sellers, whose identities can be elusive.

Amazon denied all of Mr. Bollan's allegations in court, but said it was working hard to understand what happened. It rejects the idea that the consumer experience becomes worse. But even to Amazon, the inaccessible aisles of bookstores seem mysterious, like a self-defeating neighborhood left by the authorities.

Amazon's overwhelming complexity and sheer size are increasingly becoming a political issue. Last month, the Justice Department sued to prevent Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon Schuster. The combined company is estimated to own 27% of the new book market. But Amazon has greater control over its sales. It is estimated that it owns up to two-thirds of the new and used book market through its platform and subsidiaries such as Abebooks.com.

"As a society, should we care that a company controls half of our most precious cultural goods, and its automation does not work properly?" asked Christopher Suggs, author of the book "Antitrust: Examples and Explanations."

Earlier this week, Amazon listed his book as the number one seller in the "antitrust law" category. The second-ranked seller is the "Mental Health Handbook", which deals with depression and attachment theory. Number 5 is a book about the origin of Christmas. No. 15 is a true crime story about the murder of a child. Eight of the top 20 books on the list have no obvious connection with antitrust.

"People think that Amazon's algorithm is better than it actually is," Mr. Suggs explained.

Amazon declined to say how much of its book sales were done through third parties. (For the entire market, it is more than half.) The vast majority of them are legitimate suppliers. Some are not. Mr. Bolan’s lawsuit implies that Amazon has not made much effort to distinguish between the two. This seems to be the client's job.

"In some ways, Amazon doesn't really want to be a retailer," said Juozas Kaziukenas of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce consultant. "It doesn't want to do curation or provide interpersonal interaction," two basic qualities of the retail industry for centuries.

Providing tens of millions of items to hundreds of millions of customers prevents any human contact-but opens up a lot of space for advertising, confusion, and duplicity. This may be beneficial to competitors of Amazon's physical bookstores, because the physical bookstores have much smaller inventory and stricter controls. But this does not bode well for e-commerce.

This is a large number of paradoxes: the more things you buy, the more difficult it is to find the right things among the large amounts of advertising and competition, new and second-hand materials, quality and garbage.

"Amazon knows what I buy, how often I buy it, and what I search for," Mr. Kaziukenas said. "But decades after it was launched, it couldn’t answer a simple question—what does Juozas like to buy? On the contrary, it showed me thousands of transactions, as well as some basic filters such as category and price. And hope I can find what I like. Amazon’s workload is too much."

Once upon a time, when Internet companies roamed the earth, Amazon Bookstore was a simple place. It has knowledgeable human editors, generous discounts and rapid delivery in that era. For those obsessed with books, it provides a back-up list for each publisher, these obscure but irresistible titles that were previously difficult to find and obtain.

Combining all these things in one place is a sensation. Amazon quickly grabbed market share from independent stores and chain stores.

Online shopping promises so much. When Time Magazine named Mr. Bezos the Person of the Year in 1999, it marveled that the site was "full of countless insights, innovations and wisdom."

Third-party sellers were an innovation of Amazon in the late 1990s. Before that, the store either had complete control over the shopping experience, or there were many sellers under the same roof, it was called a flea market and had a bad reputation.

Amazon theoretically provides fierce competition for the latter, while supervising the former. Introducing third-party sellers is also one way Amazon supports how it can help small businesses, which helps resolve disputes about its size and behavior.

A new report from the local Institute of Self-reliance (a research and advocacy organization that often criticizes Amazon) details the most direct benefit of third-party sellers to retailers: profits. According to calculations by non-profit organizations, third-party sellers pay $34 to Amazon for every $100 in sales, up from $19 in 2014.

This money comes from expenses, advertising and high-quality logistics, making it easier for potential buyers to see the goods. Amazon called the report "deliberately misleading" because the site does not force sellers to advertise or use its logistics system.

Amazon’s book sales is a two-tier system. Stacey Mitchell, co-director of the institute and author of the report, said, “Amazon’s toll road: how tech giants can exploit small businesses to fund their monopolistic empires.”

“The best sellers and other books you might find in your local bookstore are almost all sold by Amazon itself at prices that discourage these competitors,” Ms. Mitchell said. "Then Amazon let third-party sellers do the remaining books and take a large sum of their sales."

She added that Amazon “doesn’t care if these third-party stuff is a messy melee.” “In fact, it’s better for Amazon if legitimate businesses don’t have a chance. Just like Amazon wants to turn all jobs into odd jobs, it also Hope to turn the business into odd jobs. So that it can leave with all the spoils."

Boland, a retired journalist living near Baltimore, found the chaos to be infuriating. The whole set of things he wrote and published can be traced back to ridiculous times such as 1876, 1842, and 1774.

"This is a deceptive advertisement," he said. "Why would Amazon, a consumer advocate, allow this?"

For many years, the extraordinary price of ordinary books has been a mystery for Amazon, but it seems a new phenomenon to trace book titles in order to gain commercial advantage. Lists with false dates and lists with correct dates will get different Amazon pages. Essentially, those Boland books are located in another virtual aisle in the bookstore. This may drive sales.

Last month, a search on the website for paperback books published before 1800 resulted in more than 100,000 results. According to a seller, Barack Obama's 2008 campaign leaflet "Changes We Can Believe" was published in 1725 and sold for $45. Elsewhere in the bookstore, it sells as low as 25 cents.

Amazon said in a statement: "We do not allow the activities observed by Mr. Boland and are working to correct them." “The third-party sellers in our store seem to only sell a small portion of these books, and we have no evidence that any of them are counterfeit. We are investigating how this happened.”

Mr. Boland personally believes that his name is abused. "When the seller claimed that the 1602 edition sold for nearly $1,000, it was slandering me, implying that the book existed before I wrote it—that is, I was a copycat," he said.

Amazon argued in court documents that the same shield that protects Facebook and Twitter from being sued by users for their posts—Article 230 of the Communications Norms Act—can also protect it, even if the product is in kind.

Mark Lemley, director of the law, science and technology program at Stanford University, said the company may be right. "I don't think Amazon will be responsible for misstatements posted by others. If it doesn't know about these misstatements, of course it won't," he said.

Boland, as his lawyer, said that he made Amazon aware of the problem last spring, but found nothing. Only after he filed a lawsuit, Amazon began to withdraw the wrong listing. Amazon stated in a document that Perfect Crime's losses "if any" were not caused by Amazon and were "vague, uncertain, imaginary and speculative."

Some of the retrospective sellers mentioned in the lawsuit are located in Dallas, which makes Mr. Boland suspect that they are connected. Sandy Dunes, Open Range, and Rocky Mountain all seem to have disappeared, or may be renamed.

In 2019, Mr. Bezos celebrated the fact that Amazon's 2 million independent sellers performed so well. "Frankly: third-party sellers are kicking our first party ass," he wrote. The company stated that they earn an average of US$90,000 per year.

With a little bit of fraud, the third party may earn more, at least for a period of time.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Michigan recently announced the arrest of a case involving Amazon’s textbook rental program. Geoffrey Mark Hays Talsma is accused of selling instead of returning the books he rented on loan of "Using Econometrics: A Practical Guide," "Chemistry: Atomic First" and other books.

At Amazon, the customer is king. According to the indictment, Mr. Talsma profited by repeatedly saying that he received the wrong product. For example, he said that he mistakenly shipped flammable products that could not be returned, such as a leaking bottle of Tiki Torch Fuel. Then Amazon will credit his account.

It is worth noting the scale, duration and profitability of this so-called activity. Amazon allows customers to rent up to 15 textbooks at a time. The prosecutor said that with the help of three associates, Mr. Talsma rented more than 14,000 textbooks from Amazon in five years and made $3.4 million. His lawyer declined to comment.

Mr. Bowland said: "Amazon has done a good job in expanding the book market. Too bad, they decided not to regulate their platform because it would cause all kinds of troubles."

Amazon admits that some third-party sellers have caused problems, including fraud, counterfeiting and abuse. The retailer stated that it has invested 700 million U.S. dollars and dispatched 10,000 employees to solve these problems.

Those resources are not enough. In a policy document issued on October 18, Amazon stated that law enforcement, border control, and other authorities need to make "bold changes" to protect the integrity of e-commerce.

But Amazon refuses to ask its sellers to share more information about themselves. It opposed legislators' efforts to increase transparency, saying it would violate the privacy of sellers. Recently, it expressed caution to approve a weaker bill, but pointed out that several parts of it "can be improved."

Amazon provides writers and publishers with a wide range of sales freedom, both mediocre and misleading. The logic of this store has always been that good works go up and bad works go down. However, at the same time, some readers were attracted.

Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl has just published his autobiography "The Storyteller". A non-university publishing house called "University Press" seized the opportunity to publish "Dave Groer: A Biography", which paid Amazon to promote it along with Mr. Groer's book.

Like many of these books on Amazon, "biography" is written in a language that might be called "almost English." "It is undeniable that he played an important role in his own success," a typical sentence reads.

Nevertheless, it was sold. "Biography" that does not list the author is now labeled "Bestseller", just like Mr. Groll's own book. Amazon said that "Biography" ranks first in the new age music, ahead of "children's harmonica."

Amazon was rated as a "top review" for "biography", which was written by someone who believed that the musician himself wrote. "Grol should insist on writing songs," the critic wrote. After other buyers realized the truth, they were angry that they were tricked into buying a booklet. Even more confusing is that Mr. Groer's book is mysteriously described as a "holiday toy list."

Other newly published pamphlets are intended to summarize and explain Mr. Groll’s own work, although they are also written in almost English. One pamphlet says it provides "an explanation of the indirect and figurative statements made by the author to ensure complete understanding."

All of this is a far cry from the expansive future of Time magazine in terms of insight and wisdom.

"No one at Amazon seems to say:'We are cleaning up the store. We have to decide what is best for our customers," said Ms. Friedman, a publishing consultant.

When algorithms take action, they proceed boldly and straightforwardly.

After the Washington Redskins changed its name to the Washington Football Team, Amazon began to put books with the name "Redskins" in it. "Fighting for the old DC: George Preston Marshall, the integration of the Washington Redskins, and the rise of the new NFL" disappeared. The same goes for George McDonald Fraser's historical drama "The Flash and the Redskins".

Amazon does not intend to ban these books. In fact, it wasn't until a reporter told the retailer that it realized it had done so. It called the deletion an "error" and restored the title.

Small media said it is difficult for Amazon to admit its mistakes because it is difficult to find someone who can fix it. Valancourt Books, a publisher in Richmond, Virginia, is widely praised for its reissues of horror and homosexuality books, but often conflicts with the site.

"They will delete something, but they won't tell you why they want to delete it," said James D. Jenkins, the publisher of Varancourt. A recent case involves the new version of "Dad Demon", a novel about demon possession by the British horror novelist John Blackburn in the middle of this century. When it first appeared in 1972, the Sunday Times in London called it "a wonderful cruel reading."

Amazon considers this relatively little.

"The subject of your book violates our content guidelines," the bookseller wrote Valancourt. "Therefore, we cannot sell this book."

"We have to guess what might offend the computer," Mr. Jenkins said. "When it’s a book, how far do you want to fight? But 90% of e-books come from Amazon. If they block a title, then you don’t have a lot of sales."

Amazon spokesperson Julia Lee said: "Our review process combines machine learning, automation, and a large manual review team. Sometimes, in this case, we see human error." She declined to say what the error was.

The real impact of Amazon on Varancourt is to weaken its ambitions. The publisher launched a version of "Camilla," a Victorian story by Sheridan Le Fanu, which became important in queer studies, with professional notes and footnotes. But there are many less ambitious versions that put a cover on old text excavated from the Internet.

"Customers complained to us that they couldn't find our version, or they thought they were ordering our version, but they got some garbage versions," Mr. Jenkins said.

There are at least 20 versions of "Carmilla" on Amazon. The Valancourt version, which is really hard to find on the website, has 1,206 comments, some of which are obviously talking about inferior versions. "It does not include forwards," a critic complained in almost English, and showed pictures from another book. The Valancourt book has an introduction.

So the story has a complete cycle again. A great gift Amazon gave to loyal readers in 1999 was to make every printed book available in a few days, and it was very gorgeous. Now the site is a maze of fragments. Varankul has given up.

"We have basically stopped publishing academic editions of texts from the 18th and 19th centuries," Mr. Jenkins said.

Bad things drive good things out, but Amazon promotes automation.

Danny Caine, the owner of a bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, wrote a letter to Mr. Bezos in 2019, stating that "your book business has devalued the book itself." Aroused national attention. Mr. Kane is now writing a book, and he concluded on Twitter the other day: "Amazon is terrible."

A software program saw the fusion of "Amazon" and "bad" and began to take action.

"We are sorry for this experience," Amazon said in an automated tweet to Mr. Kane, but he didn't catch the point. "Without providing any account or personal details, can you provide us with more insights into the problem you are experiencing? Let us know. We will do our best to help."