I’m trying to add a book to my Amazon Seller’s account. Amazon, as you may know, sells books.

It asks me to upload an image of the book. So I upload the images supplied by the publisher. This seems right, almost suspiciously right.

Amazon rejects it.

I read the instructions. They want photos of the front and back cover, the title page, and they want the ASIN number. Maybe a photo of the ASIN number.

“Only real-world images are accepted. Scanned or digital images, or images that have been amended, are not acceptable.”

Ah. I have entered Brazil.

Digital images are not acceptable. Amazon wants me to upload an image, a non-digital one. Am I to shoot with film? No, that would require scanning. Unacceptable.

And “amended” seems a bit bureaucratic here. An amendment ordinarily means a change made to a document, agreement, law, or record. You amend a contract. You don’t amend a photograph. Since 1990, when Photoshop came out, the word has been “edited.”

I think Amazon means it wants an unedited picture.

“Edited” isn’t merely more familiar. It’s semantically better. Does Amazon object to every possible edit? If I photograph the book, crop away my kitchen table, square up the perspective, correct white balance, and save it as a JPEG, have I “amended” the image? Apparently so; they rejected mine.

Photo of real-world object vs. “real-world photo.” It would be a start.

The striking thing is that the problem isn’t simply terrible writing. It’s a failure to model the user’s situation. Someone had a budget.

It’s as though the world’s most sophisticated bureaucracy has hired a clerk who communicates exclusively through fragments of an ISO 9001 manual. Here we, its customers, are given the perspective of its internal compliance system.

I, a seller and customer, encounter it from the perspective of a person thinking: I have a book. The publisher gave me excellent cover art. Amazon wants a picture of the book.

Eventually, I surmised that what they mean is that, for this particular step, they want a photograph of the physical book, not marketing copy. They probably want to know the seller actually possesses a copy, rather than downloading the publisher’s cover art and claiming to have a warehouse full of books somewhere. And no fraudster would think of buying one physical book and shooting an unamended photo.

Proof of physical product? Why not say so.

“Please upload an unedited photo of the physical, paper book. We use this to verify that you possess the physical product. Publisher-supplied cover art can be uploaded later but won’t be accepted at this step. ”

Three sentences. That would transform the entire interaction. “Suddenly “Real-world,” “scanned,” “digital,” and “amended” become intelligible. The seller need not reverse-engineer it from vocabulary created by a particularly inarticulate compliance department.

Amazon is an extraordinarily sophisticated technological enterprise. Somewhere behind this little dialog box are probably image-recognition systems of astonishing complexity, databases containing billions of objects, fraud-detection algorithms, and artificial intelligence capable of doing things that would have looked like science fiction last week.

And yet we have “real world unamended image.”

Oh, and the dropdown box for book category has 100+ unsorted items in it. And if you pick one, it doesn’t stick. All books are category Books/Economics.

It’s very Brazil, which is almost a great movie, available on Amazon.

Terry Gilliam had one terrific idea: what happens when bureaucracy becomes so elaborate that the machinery intended to serve people becomes the thing people have to serve?

Unfortunately, Gilliam had several other ideas he tried to put in the same movie – a Kafkaesque slapstick comedy, a dystopian political satire, a parody of mid-century futurism, and something about terrorism and state violence.

Amazon, on the other hand, seems to have gotten Gilliam’s terrific one exactly right.