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Have you ever looked at your books and thought that one of them just doesn’t quite look right? Well, before you start thinking that you are going mad, there could be a reason for this. There is a chance that you could have just found a counterfeit book in your collection. Nowadays it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the real books and the fakes thanks to the illegal practice of pirating getting more sophisticated. That’s why we have put together a quick guide to help you make sure that you are only buying (or selling) the real deal and avoiding counterfeit books.
So, let’s take a look at some tips and techniques to help you identify fake books.
Quite often, counterfeiters will produce counterfeit paperback versions of popular hardbacks shortly after they come out. If your book is a paperback but it has the same ISBN as the hardback printed on the back or on the copyright pages, it’s possible you are looking at a pirate book. Paperbacks are much cheaper and easier to make; counterfeiters are more concerned with producing a cheap product than producing books to high standard.
Once a book is published, it might end up being printed at several different binderies if it remains in print for a long time. Covers may change, minor corrections may be made without the book being a new edition, different binderies may even use different print technologies or materials, but the size and format should be fairly consistent for books of the same ISBN. Counterfeiters may change the trim size substantially to use less paper per page, or use larger pages to reduce page count.
Next, you should take a closer look at the materials used to make the book. Simply by having a quick flick through you can get a good idea of the quality of the materials used to make the book. To check for cheap materials, look out for the following:
Before a book is published it will go through a rigorous screening process to weed out any errors. It's not impossible for some mistakes to slip through the net, but it’s very rare for a professionally published book to have more than one or two errors. So, if the book question is missing pieces of grammar and misspelling words regularly, there is a chance that it has been copied or counterfeited.
Judge the book by its cover. The quality of any images or writing on the front cover of a book can tell you a lot about the production quality of the book, and as we have learned, poor production quality can be a sign of counterfeiting. If the images or graphics on the front or back cover of a book are blurred, pixelated, or don't quite look right, the book could be a counterfeit.
Everyone loves that new book smell, but if you find yourself with a book that doesn’t quite smell right, maybe it has a lingering chemical smell or the unmistakable smell of dampness, it could be the result of cheap or poorly kept materials because of the cost-cutting common in counterfeiting.
Putting a book together isn’t just about spelling all the words properly, it takes a fair amount of organisation to ensure it is readable and not just a mess of words. Unfortunately, counterfeiters might be unwilling to make the effort to arrange and format books properly leading to disorganised content and mismatched pages. So, if your book looks messy, with things like inconsistent page numbers, scattered text, and out-of-place images, it could be a counterfeit book.
Counterfeit books are often made by essentially printing out an ebook. When counterfeiters do this, they often leave clues in the book. The publishing information may include an “eISBN” instead of the ISBN for the printed work. Often the contents page lacks page numbers and may be made up of underlined sections that would have been hyperlinks in a digital edition. It’s quite normal for references to webpages to appear as hyperlinks in printed works, but highly suspicious for these to appear in other contexts like the contents page.
It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the name of the publisher and where your books are printed. If something doesn’t look familiar to you or there is a clear spelling error, you can enter the name of the publisher or printer into Google to check their validity.
The barcode of a book is a good indicator of its print quality. Because barcodes need to be detailed, they can be easily blurred or altered if the printing quality of the book isn’t up to scratch, so if you have any queries about the general print quality of a book, have a look at the barcode and check for any smudges or blemishes.
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So, you have been through all the steps to identify a counterfeit book and discovered that your new book is a counterfeit, the next question is what should you do with it? Follow the steps below and help publishers crack down on any future illegal copies and reduce the risk of it happening again.
The first thing you should do is collect as much information about your counterfeit books as possible, this can include:
Once you have collected all the information you can it’s always a good idea to reach out to the original publisher explaining the situation and include all the details you collected on the book including some pictures of the counterfeit book. All you need to do then is wait for a response; the publisher might request that you send the counterfeit book to them for further investigation.
If you have confirmed that your books or the books you are looking to buy are counterfeit, then you can report it to Trading Standards who may choose to take legal action. Get a Refund
If you have already purchased a counterfeit book without knowing it was counterfeit, you may be entitled to a refund. In such a case you should contact the seller or the third-party platform that you bought the book from originally.
Unfortunately, the quality of counterfeit books is only getting better, making it likely that you will have, at some point, added a counterfeit book to your collection without even knowing it. So, it’s a good idea to look through all your books to root out any other potential counterfeits.
So, that brings our guide on how to identify counterfeit books to an end. We hope that you now have the tools to pick out any counterfeit books that may come your way in the future. Don’t forget to sort through all your old books to weed out any counterfeits and help reduce the risk of others buying counterfeit books in the future by reporting them to the relevant authorities.
Interested in discovering more ways of keeping on top of your book collection? Head over to our blog for loads for fresh content posted regularly.
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