Counterfeit George Orwell Books on Amazon

David Streitfeld, writing for The New York Times:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the language meant to make bad thoughts literally unthinkable. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one true believer exults.

Now some of the writer’s own words are getting reworked in Amazon’s vast virtual bookstore, a place where copyright laws hold remarkably little sway. Orwell’s reputation may be secure, but his sentences are not.

Over the last few weeks I got a close-up view of this process when I bought a dozen fake and illegitimate Orwell books from Amazon. Some of them were printed in India, where the writer is in the public domain, and sold to me in the United States, where he is under copyright.

Amazon’s credibility problem with counterfeit products is as bad as ever, but it’s particularly rich when it comes to bastardized versions of Orwell’s oeuvre.

★ Monday, 19 August 2019