Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
It's not the storage costs or bandwidth -- it's more the personnel and management that is required to maintain the catalog, copies, updates, versions, etc.
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Which I clumped together as creating the original formatting. I should probably have been more specific. Amazon doesn't actually maintain their catalogues, the authors / publishers do. The only time amazon would get directly involved is if they receive a complaint. It's all automated, they populate their database with content from the publishers' databases, or the authors enter it themselves in the case of self-publishing. Just imagine if amazon were to enter all the data for all their products, electronic and physical. There'd be more updates than their entire workforce's man-hours each day.
I'm sure there's exceptions for specific products but for 99% of the products it will be automated. Also explains why some amazon product pages look like utter horror stories and others like works of art.