Is Amazon.com evil?
This may be a purely innocent misunderstanding, but I went on to Amazon.com today to try and order a book (that I am going to give away at my upcoming Great Ideas session). The book is several years old. When I searched under the title (Who Really Matters), I got this page of results. The first hit was an out of print version of the book (that I would not be able to order from Amazon directly), the second hit was some weird movie, and the third hit (which had the cover image of the book I have at home) I thought would be what I needed–except it was the KINDLE version.
Okay, so they are promoting their new $400 book reader. Fine. Except they didn’t have the actual book version on the first page of hits–all the rest were unrelated to this book. Bummer, I thought, the book must no longer be available.
So then I googled the title and the author’s last name, and found Art Kleiner has his own site. On that site, they had a link to buy the book on Amazon, and lo and behold, here is the page on Amazon where you can buy the PRINT version of the book that they were pushing for Kindle.
Shouldn’t this page have showed up when I searched for the title? I think it is evil that they will hide what I want, when they KNOW it’s what I want, pushing me to buy their exclusive delivery system. Am I over-reacting here?
4 Comments
Dennis D. McDonald
When you focus on BOOKS from the pulldown list you get the print edition when you do the title search.
Jamie Notter
Okay, I’ll give them that. Thanks, Dennis. Still, I typed in the title of a book, I have to think that should show up on the first page of hits even when I didn’t specify BOOKS…
Dave Coriale
Poor content management planning, bad usability practices & design, evil … it’s all the same really.
I did notice that in the top search result (the one that directs you to other sites from which you can buy the book) there is a link under “Also Available in:” labeled Hardcover. If you click that you get the page linked to from the author’s site. I don’t think this is the work of an evil genius – unless we’re talking the Simon Barsinister level evil genius.
jessie pullme
Designed by engineers in India… and they have “the Bomb”???
Ha!