I like Amazon.com

I like Amazon. I know that some of my friends don't like it, but Amazon, to me, is one of the very first effective commercial web sites. You go there and buy books, and it suggests other books you might like. My friends who don't like it think it's big brother-ish. I found the suggestions useful, and I discovered some authors that I would have never found without them. They are suggestions, not directions, and you can ignore them if you wish. I know there are other web sites that do the same thing, but Amazon was one of the first that I found. There was a toys.com site that was pretty good, too, for gifts. Now every site tries to model itself after Amazon. I buy a lot of books, mostly from Amazon, because they have everything. If you discover a new author that you love, and you want to read his entire life works, but you are limited to whatever the local bookstore or library happens to have on hand. At Amazon, you can see and order every book by that author still in print, and many that are no longer in print. You can free-associate, and search by topic, by genre, by similar author, see reviews and lists by other readers, and find all kinds of new things. The new search feature A9 allows you to search within the content of books, too. There are editor's recommendations. And while they don't always hit, in fact they miss more than they hit, this kind of browsing is the virtual equivalent of walking through the bookstore, perusing the shelves, asking the opinions of the clerks and fellow customers. And I like it.

I tend to keep track of book ideas with my wish list, kind of like a tickler file (I hate that expression, it's always seemed too ebullient to me)and buying in bulk, formerly to avoid the shipping charges, but now that they have free shipping for orders over $25, it's just habit. My most recent order was 16 books and 5 CD's. See my profile here. I just updated it to show recent purchases. You can see my wish list here. This may not be representative of what I’m reading, since I usually bookmark a bunch of books and then buy only a few of them. For example, I bookmarked a dozen or so poker books, but I'm only going to buy one or two.

I've bought other things at the Amazon site, like toys, a wireless mouse, my iPod, DVD's, CD's, and software. I buy all the books for the book club, it's just as easy to get seven copies as one. But the real strength of the site is finding books you want to read. And that's why I like it.