[Ads-l] bookjacking, bookjacker

[George Thompson]

Not in the OED.  I've encountered it twice at other listservs, most
recently at C18-L.  One of the posts there linked to a website with the
following explanation.

Zubal Books Advises buyers to NEVER Purchase From Bookjackers

Bookjackers: Who they are, what they do, and why YOU should NEVER purchase
from them.

We've been selling books online since about 1995. Over the years we've seen
many changes in our own company as well as at sites like Abebooks.com,
Amazon.com, and Alibris. One of the worst developments has been the rise of
the BOOKJACKERS.

Who is a bookjacker? A more appropriate question may be what is a
bookjacker. From what we've been able to piece together, there are about 40
"sellers" on Abe & Amazon (we don't really bother looking at Alibris and
Half.com all that much) that do not own any of their own stock, but simply
hijack other legitimate booksellers' listings from other websites and then
post the listings with inflated prices. The availability of APIs (
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/API.html) from Abe, Half.com and
(especially) Amazon have made it very easy for people with computer
programming skill to become bookjackers and pull the wool over unsuspecting
consumers' collective eyes.

*Here's how it works.* A legitimate seller is selling a book on Half.com.
Perhaps he's offering the ONLY copy on Half.com and coincidentally, there
are no copies available on Amazon. The bookjacker, by way of his advanced
software, is able to quickly detect the presence of this title on Half.com,
it's ABSENCE on Amazon.com, and then upload his own offer for this title at
Amazon.com at an inflated price. What then follows is that most of the
other bookjackers quickly follow suit and you have a marketplace that looks
like this:

At 10 a.m. on Monday morning:
Book A becomes available on Half.com by a legitimate seller for $25
Book A is currently not available on Amazon.com
Shortly thereafter bookjacker software detects the book on Half.com and
quickly posts it to Amazon.com. So a few hours later the Marketplace on
Amazon looks like:

Bookjacker1, $89.95
Bookjacker2, $89.99
Bookjacker3, $91.11
Bookjacker4, $95.50
etc.

​GAT​

-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
picture of his great-grandfather.)
http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/james-gillray/an-excrescence---a-fungus-alias-a-toadstool-upon-a-dunghill/3851

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