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On writing

Buying books outside of Amazon

So Hachette and Amazon finally came to an agreement. That’s good to see.

While the dispute was on I only bought one book from Amazon, and that one had been on order before the dispute started.

Interestingly, I’ve bought more books in the last six months than I have in the last six years. Especially eBooks. The best thing about the purchases is that they’ve all been .epub versions, so I can read them on my favourite eReader, rather than on the Kindle.

 

A note, two weeks later:

I’ve been thinking about this. I was trying to make a stand by deliberately not buying through Amazon, but it coincided with a general downturn in my interactions with the company outside of the dispute, and it’s all about marketing and targeting to the customer. I don’t read the Amazon marketing mails any more. In fact, I nearly deleted the email telling me the book I had on pre-order had arrived because I auto-delete their mails as soon as they come through. There’s never anything in them that interests me. If I go to their website to browse I have to wade through a lot of junk before I get to something I want. Nowadays, my sole dealings with Amazon seem to be reading book reviews and first pages–and I already know the book title and author before I get there.

Browsing, to buy books on Amazon, it’s just not worth the effort.

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