Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Tag: amazon

Sales pitching.

Talk about some bookselling irony: Goliath helping out little Davy (or Larry, in actuality).

Days have been spent repairing the damage from the Java Incident (deleting Java from the computers on the network at the urgent advice of Homeland Security, just days before Oracle issued a security patch to fix the problem). The system isn’t fully restored yet, but I am slightly encouraged, enough that I could take a break from wearing the repairman hat.

During that lull in the frustrating action, I was finally able to reconnect to the internet. Ha! Naturally, I checked email, and as a result, got a little smile-provider. The book behemoth Amazon had sent me a message (I don’t recall ever getting a random sales pitch before). It wasn’t so much the idea of Amazon doing direct mail that made me grin, it was the content.

You can click on the image to see why I smiled.

Along with other companies like Google, who are archiving all of my internet interests and activities, Amazon perceived that I like History, and decided to recommend some book titles. It pleased me to note that two of the three top books listed as being of possible interest to me, were my own titles.

Maybe I’ll buy one.

Mark the date: May 19, 2011 ends the reign of King Book.

Everyone was expecting it, but still – wasn’t it supposed to happen a little later in history? Thursday ends the reign of the Paper King, supplanted by its young descendent, Prince eBook.

Amazon, the big book retailer (they sell small ones, too), announced on Thursday that sales of electronic books, those digital computer files that are read on the screens of such devices as the Kindle and the Nook, officially surpassed the sales of regular paper editions.

In the future, when the generations of little e-readers look back on the occasion, they’ll note that the actual date was April 1, 2011, when Amazon.com sales of e-books began to outpace physical editions at the rate of 105 to 100 copies sold. Some Kindle books are provided without charge, but Amazon says those figures are not included in the statistics, otherwise the ratio would be even higher.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly.”

Amazon has been selling the old-fashioned books for fifteen years, and the electronic kind for just over three.

I’ve yet to even hold one in my hands.

That’s probably a good thing.