Copycats in Apple Books

Last year I wrote a blog post Apple in China, Ripoff in Amazon about a copycat book in Amazon search results. Sadly, it appears that Apple Books is no better than Amazon. I’m currently rereading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita for a book club. I read the classic novel for a Russian literature class way back as a college undergraduate but hadn’t read it since. The English translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, $9.99 USD in Apple Books, was recommended to me. When I searched Apple Books for The Master and Margarita, the results included many different versions, some of which were $0.99 rather than $9.99, a substantial, tempting difference in price. Looking closer, though, I noticed that these shockingly cheap versions were all marked by the strange absence of a marking: despite the fact that the books are in English, their covers fail to name any English translators. Apple Books does name the seller and publisher: Angelo Miguel dos Santos Pereira: The…