That Amazon Meme ...

[hrj]

You know that amazon.com meme that's going around? The one where you look up what the first two things were that you ever bought from the site? I have only ever bought one book from amazon.com. I bought it this past Christmas. The only reason I used amazon.com was because I'd left all my Christmas shopping until the 24th and I was in a small town in Maine and I was desperate. If I want to order a book on-line, I'll track down the publisher's site, or find a topic-specific distributor, or ... or pretty much anything else that I can think of before I'll decide that I need the book badly enough and soon enough that I have to stoop to Amazon.

Not everything that's cheap and easy is in your long-term self-interest.

Comments

[lifeofglamour.livejournal.com]

So what's wrong with buying from Amazon? I know several people that work there, they seem ok.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Amazon.com has a long history (well, as long as the company's existence, anyway) of rather nasty, back-stabbing anti-competitive practices. Their legal interactions with the Amazon Bookstore (a much older and well-known-within-certain-circles feminist bookstore in Minneapolis) leave a bad taste. I once heard an interview with amazon.com's founder where he was boasting about the shady tricks he pulled in the early days to get around publishers' minimum wholesale order requirements in order to avoid having amazon.com carry any actual inventory. And then there was the April 2009 event where amazon.com "accidentally" (but extremely systematically) removed all indexing and sales-ranking data from gay/lesbian/queer-related books -- except, mysteriously enough, from anti-gay polemics -- such that if you tried to search on any of those topics the only books that would turn up would be of the "How to Cure Yourself of teh Gay" variety.

And separately from the specific issues with amazon.com, I believe that the only way to preserve a wide range of consumer options is to preserve a wide range of competing commercial venues. A vendor like amazon.com will offer to sell you everything today in order to establish a virtual monopoly, but once they have that monopoly, you're stuck buying only what they choose to sell you. And what if they don't choose to sell you queer-positive books ... or books from publishers who refuse to give amazon a bigger discount than they give everyone else ... or print-on-demand books from any publisher other than amazon's in-house POD division. (Oops, they already tried that last one, too.)

[lifeofglamour.livejournal.com]

Ah ok. Thank you, I did not know.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I've never ordered from them. For lots of reasons 1) my reluctance to spend money in the first place (decades of a student budget) 2) hesitance to spend money on line for physical objects that would then need to be shipped (both because I fear that things will get lost in the mail, and because if I pay for it I want it *now*--I have no problems purchasing plane tickets on line, because I can print out the "ticket" straight away) 3) a desire to touch an item before making the decision to take it home with me 4) the sorts of moral issues you mention in the reply to lifeofglamour

[lapioggia.livejournal.com]

amazon is local for me so using them at least contributes a bit to my local economy (though I mostly don't get books through them anyway but electronics & household items) but while I prefer to buy my books in local independant shops whenever possible, I do use Amazon for some of the stuff I can't find here.
Somewhat inconsistantly, I won't set foot in a Barnes & Noble or a Borders because of similar agressive policies that drive small bookstores out of business(and pathetically limited stock)

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

My first amazon.com purchases date back to well before the publishers had much online presence themselves. The only other choices we *had* within a 20 mile radius were Borders, and Barnes&Noble. So if we were going to get screwed anyway, we might as well go for cheap. Also, more than half of what we wanted, the brick+mortar stores would have to order anyway (see above comment about pathetically limited stock).

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

I use Amazon (strictly speaking, I use Amazon Marketplace for nearly all of my Amazon-oriented purchases, so IIRC most of my money is going to one of the smaller guys).

I would much rather go to my friendly neighborhood indie bookstore--if I had one, but I don't. The two closest brick-and-mortar bookstores to me are a Borders and a Barnes and Noble, which doesn't seem like much of an improvement, frankly.

I still buy most of my CDs from a used-and-rare classical record store near Union Square, but schlepping home a bag of CDs is a whole lot easier than schlepping a bag of books from the Strand (and, frankly, I'm just not that crazy about the Strand: organization-wise, it's like the Library of Alexandria after it was sacked).

If I still lived near Chicago, I would do all my bookbuying in Hyde Park--if that's any consolation :-)