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

[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 :-)