Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: amazon, Comics, entertainment

Amazon To Cause Chaos By Merging Comic Book Listings

Published Mon, 11 Apr 2016 09:00:22 -0500

Amazon sells a lot of books. And a lot of comics. In print as well as digitally. They also supply a service for other people to sell items through Amazon for a fee.

And the details for most titles are already there, you don't have to add your own, just that you have a copy, are willing to sell it, and how much you will sell it for.

However some people have noticed that, as of last week, some of the items they are selling have now changed to something else. At least in Amazon's eyes.

By its nature, Amazon Marketplace has created multiple entries for the same item, something that can make it harder for people to find what they are looking for. Well, for the last week, Amazon has been systematically "merging" non-ISBN numbered items, such as single issue comic book with an ASIN number instead into a single ASIN listing, despite maybe having a variant cover, be of a different printing or even a completely different volume.

Apparently, Amazon's automatic software has been locating items with an ASIN number with no associated ISBN number, it then looks at the keywords used in that title and merges them indiscriminately, effectively killing all the old listings.

Case in point, Catwoman vol 1 #2 1993 by Jim Balent, Jo Duffy and Dick Giordano was merged with Catwoman vol 2 #2 by Brubaker, Cooke and Allred. If you were to buy that on Amazon from one of ts Amazon Marketplace sellers, you literally do not know which version you are getting.

A situation that neither retailer nor reader will be happy with….

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