Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Free From Amazon

Friday, March 13th, 2009

I’ve been harping on Jeff Bezos, the kindle, and the lack of wishlist support (still not there), and swearing I wasn’t going to buy another paid book till they fixed it.  And indeed, I’ve been using Project Gutenberg, and manybooks.net, to get my books for free, reading lots of classic lit that I never was willing to pay to read.

Anna K is a good book.  Madame Bovary has been mostly underwhelming so far.

But today, I discovered the amazon tag “kindle freebies”.  There are 24 pages of actual books, and a few sorta-cliff-notes-esque summary/bibliography collections.  And they appear to really be free, though you have to assign a credit card to the transaction anyways.  Apart from the summary collections, they appear  to be decent quality and unabridged.  I bought at least 2 dozen, including stuff like The Jungle, Treasure Island, and even some modern stuff like Red Mars.  Of course, one of the first books I bought was the combo of Red Mars/Green Mars, so that one was more a curiosity.

There are a couple of romance novels by current authors, that seem to be available for free to get you hooked on the author.  Hopefully more authors will try this.

No Wii Fit For You

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

So, amazon has this thing on the Wii Fit page where you can sign up for a text message when they get some more in stock.  The message went off today, and in an unusual state of affairs, I actually felt the message buzz on my phone and went to the amazon site immediately.

It was already out of stock again.

Elapsed time between receipt of SMS and visit to the fit page couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds.

Wishlist Surprises

Monday, August 4th, 2008

I’ve had an Amazon wishlist for quite a while.  When I first started buying from them, I used an actual Wyse terminal attached to an external modem (for the purposes highly overpowered at 19.2kbps).  Sometimes an item ends up on the list that I have no clue why I put it there.  Like the 6-CD’s of crappy covers that is Party With Pride,which if my guess is correct, I put on the list for it’s cover of “99 Red Balloons”.  But the ‘artist’ names are totally worth the used CD price I paid….”Venus With Penus”…alllllllrighty then =p

Amazon Idiocy Continues

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

It appears that amazon views the idea of wishlists for kindle owners as some sort of state secret.  After first getting a completely useless response from support, I was able to get thru to someone who went to great lengths to do a pathetic attempt at a “wink-and-a-nod” not-denial that there might ever be such a feature, in the future, at this time. blah blah blah.  

What The Hell?!?

I get it, your programming staff was lazy or incompetent, when it came to the wishlist integration, and a lazy project lead/manager said, “well hell, they can use gift certificates, so what if they’re impersonal, loathed, and attach stigma to the giver, I’ve got a schedule to keep, and damn the customers!!”.  I get that you can’t come out and be THAT honest.  But come on, “At this time, we have no further details to announce at this time regarding this option”?