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

[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.