More thoughts on Amazonfail

[morgan_dhu]

Fortunately, I remembered to check my outstanding book orders - I had an open order with some unshipped items from Amazon.ca. I cancelled my order immediately, and made use of the nice little box they provided for comments to explain exactly why I had cancelled and why I would not be ordering from them again while this "adult books" policy is in effect.

Now, of course, I will go find somewhere else to order the cancelled items from, because it's important that the authors don't suffer from our protest actions - many of them are already going to hurt enough when their books don't appear in searches and on bestseller lists - because that's one of the very important ways that authors reach new readers, and that's why this issue is about so much more than just making it harder for us, the readers, to find the books we want to read.

Authors who are writing the kinds of books that we will no longer be able to find from casual searches are going to lose sales if this policy continues, and some of them may not be able to find publishers in the future if their sales numbers fall, and that will make all of us immeasurably poorer.

So - don't just protest this.

If you can, if you have the financial ability to do so, please consider going to your local independent bookseller, or to an online bookseller that's not out to censor books and impoverish authors who are writing "adult" material, and buy one of the books that has been stripped of its sales ranking on Amazon. There's lots of good books to choose from.

Comments

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

I very seldom, almost never, buy books from Amazon. I do, however, buy DVDs. There is no local business here that sells Doctor Who DVDs, and it's cheaper to buy online than to make a trip over to Vancouver to buy them. Chapters-Indigo sells them, but they are substantially more expensive than Amazon. While I'm incredibly angry at Amazon's actions, I am quite reluctant to spend up to 20 extra dollars just to prove a point. Of course, at the moment I'm not buying DVDs from anyone.

Edit: Okay, I was wrong. The price differences aren't that substantial. There's very little difference. The difference in selection, however, is. Amazon has many more choices than Chapters.

[mishaslair.livejournal.com]

Can you buy from half.com in Canada? It's owned by eBay, but you can find new and used DVDs there at prices comparable to, if not lower than, Amazon.

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

Nope. Half.com only takes registration from the United States. Even though the signup form says "state/province" they don't include any Canadian provinces, and the "country" option ONLY includes "United States." Too bad, because they have some pretty good deals on DVDs.

[mishaslair.livejournal.com]

For whatever it's worth (just another random data point), I just did a search for "Annie Proulx" and Brokeback Mountain was in the search results. But a comparison of Brokeback Mountain and The Shipping News shows the search ranking was listed for the latter but not the former. Amazon boneheads.

[roykay.livejournal.com]

I know that Borders and Barnes & Noble sell DVDs. You can also try Netflix, which I am sure would be more that happy to sell anything they now rent. In fact, at times they do, and will have no objections to increased sales.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if you intended to address this to me or to rainbow_goddess, but both of us live in Canada. For us to regularly patronise American booksellers would involve extremely high postage rates - Something I'm quite familiar with because I do from time to time order directly from American small presses.

Fortunately, there is another major Canadian online bookseller, Chapters.indigo.ca.

Netflix is also US based, although we have a similar service in Canada, called Cinemail.