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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
"Ukrposhta" removed pirated books from its new marketplace that users found there on the service's first day of operation. The company launched its own marketplace together with Kasta just a few days ago, presenting over 10 million products on the platform with free delivery. Among the assortment, buyers noticed counterfeit editions and books by Russian authors. After a wave of criticism, the company took these items off sale.
Buyers found pirated copies of Rebecca Yarros's "Fourth Wing" and "Iron Flame" on the platform, as well as Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," Laurent Goumarre's "God Always Travels Incognito," and "#Любов Hate" by Russian author Anna Jane. The situation was reported by Ukrainska Pravda.Culture, which received a comment from the company.
"Our goal is to support Ukrainian producers and entrepreneurs, as well as to create a convenient and accessible shopping space for Ukrainians," the company said in a statement.
The company added that it has already responded to the criticism and is discussing with partners how to improve assortment checks so that similar situations do not recur.
Counterfeits have flooded other marketplaces as well
The spread of pirated books through online platforms is not a new problem: similar items are found on OLX, Prom, Bigl, and Rozetka. Back in 2021, an interagency working group to combat online counterfeits was supposed to begin operating at the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications of Ukraine, but it never started its work. In 2024, the Ukrainian National Office of Intellectual Property and Innovations and the Ukrainian Book Institute, together with the Ukrainian Association of Publishers and Booksellers, organized a roundtable where publishers noted that 60-70% of counterfeit sales fall on marketplaces, and it is almost impossible to hold the seller accountable.
Artem Bidenko, chairman of the board of the Ukrainian Publishers Association, said that about a third of the book market in Ukraine consists of pirated editions, and the main obstacle in combating them remains the slow complaint mechanism at Google. According to him, the association works more effectively with marketplaces — after complaints, items there are blocked immediately, which does not happen with the search engine.
Earlier, Informator reported that Ukrposhta warned about a fraudulent scheme involving phishing SMS messages in which scammers demand payment of an alleged customs fee for a parcel to extract customers' banking details. We also wrote that the Kremenets District Court of Ternopil region sentenced a former head of a mobile Ukrposhta branch to five years in prison for embezzling more than 593 thousand hryvnias of pension payments.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Піратські книжки та російські автори – Укрпошта потрапила у скандал у перший день роботи маркетплейсу". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Informator.
