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Originally Posted by eschwartz
How exactly is it unfortunate or offensive?
As HarryT points out, there is a good reason for it.
More importantly, what harm does it cause, besides for getting people to reread the book? Is this another one of those "Amazon is evil, just, you know, because" things? All the librarians I know seem to be under the rather stupid delusion that the important thing is to get people to read more. (Silly them, don't they realize it's far more important to protect literature from the degradation of being associated with money-grubbers from a South American river?)
Which is what Amazon excels at. Because it involves selling people stuff.
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I didn't say it was "offensive". Please don't put words in my mouth. I don't like it because it adds another step to the process that can be a pain, especially for some of tech challenged patrons. I had one patron using a fire who used the Overdrive app to borrow the book and then had to go to Amazon's page to download the title. On a tablet, with EPUB, you just use the Overdrive app for the entire process. PDFs, also require an extra step. I honestly just want it so that all books, regardless of format, can be downloaded using the same steps.
As for the ad part, in libraryland, some librarians despise the idea of the library being used to sell books for Amazon or any company. This is because the library is a public institution that isn't usually in the business of providing sales for businesses. It isn't about Amazon being evil. It's about preserving the integrity of public libraries.