A female priest said Amazon sold $240,000 worth of counterfeit copies of her faith-based book before it was removed from the site.
Tish Harrison Warren, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, is the author of "Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life," her first book, which took her three years to complete.
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The author said she found out from her publisher, InterVarsity Press (IVP), that the book was copied and sold by a third-party on Amazon for about nine months.
IVP estimates 15,000 fake copies were sold before a customer complained in June, alerting them to the scheme totaling over $240,000 in lost revenue for Warren.
A counterfeit copy of Christian author Tish Harrison Warren's "liturgy of the ordinary: sacred practices in everyday life" next to an original one published by InterVarsity Press. (InterVarsity Press)
“It’s a huge loss of money for my family. Percentage-wise of what I make as a writer, it’s an enormous amount of that," Warren told Christianity Today, a day after she learned about how large-scale the fraud was, and she later asked her readers on her blog to pray and thanked them for reading her book "whether your copy was legitimate or not."
The New York Times reported in June that there was a surge of counterfeit books on Amazon.
Amazon removed the re-sellers of the counterfeit editions from its stores after IVP filed a formal complaint through the Seattle-based tech company's standard protocols.
InterVarsity Press highlights a counterfeit copy of one of their author's books, "liturgy of the ordinary," sold on Amazon. (InterVarsity Press)
"We are grateful for Amazon’s response to our complaint and its expressed openness to hear directly from us if we encounter counterfeit editions in the future," IVP wrote in a statement. "We consider Amazon a valued trade partner and recognize the extraordinary place it occupies in the global supply chain for books."
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Warren's publisher invested in a new service that allows them to monitor who is controlling the Amazon buy button as fake third-party sellers is not always a sign of counterfeiting. The company hopes this will alert other publishers to the issue of counterfeits and for customers to be more aware.
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