|
Back before I figured out how to get gifts off the list, Amazon seized on some mindless celebrity biography I got for my (now-ex-)sister-in-law for Christmas or her birthday or something, and tried incessantly to push more of the same on me. One celebrity bio in maybe a hundred books that are anything but, and that's what the thing got fixated on.
They also keep trying to sell me new hardcover fiction. A quick check of my ordering history would demonstrate that I have never bought a single HC novel from them, but I've bought many MM paperbacks, and perhaps give their little bot a moment's pause ... maybe if we recommeded MM paperbacks instead, WW would buy them? But nooo ... they keep pushing the stuff I don't buy, and not recommending the stuff I do buy, and buy from them, and have bought many times.
There's that, and there's the fact that unless it's been changed recently, it's not possible to search for just the English-language books by any given author. So if the author you're looking for has books that have been translated into a dozen different languages, you have to dig through all of them to find the handful you can actually read.
Oh, and there's no way to make it not try to sell you a Kindle. So if you're looking for a book in MM, and you search on (or click on) author, you can't de-select Kindle, either, so for the one book you want, you have listings in every possible language, and listings for an ebook reader you don't own and don't want ... and it's just not worth it. I've stopped paying any attention to their recommendations at all, whereas I used to buy a lot of them because they recommended the books I wanted.
Amazon thinks by pushing HC's to me, I'll buy HC's instead of MM, by pushing foreign-language books to me, I'll learn a dozen new languages (and buy the same book in all of them, apparently), and by pushing Kindle books to me, I'll throw away my Sony Reader and buy a Kindle. Amazon is dead wrong. And I'm pretty peeved, because after years of training their recommendation engine to know my library and my preferences, now I can't use it ... because it's recommending what Amazon wants to sell, not what I want to buy. Amazon is leaving my money on the table.
Well, that's my screaming, spittle-flecked rant for the day. It's just frustrating, though: I liked that system so much more when it recommended books I wanted to buy, so I could, y'know, buy them.
|