Amazon
When I first came to England in 2001, I met a lady who told me that she worked for a company called Amazon, an internet mail-order bookstore. At the time, I thought: “this is a really cool idea, but I don’t think that I will ever actually buy anything off the internet”, an example from a long list of things that “I would never do” that have ended up being part of my life.
Being in the UK, I always order my books from amazon.co.uk so had not looked at the amazon.com site until I clicked on the link in Brian Clegg’s comment on my Sunday post. The content on the two sites is actually quite different!!
Let us have a look at the entries for Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” as an example:
On the UK site
On the US site
The US site seems to have a lot of added features so if you would like to use amazon as an information source or as a “discussion forum” it might be worthwhile for those of us on this side of the Atlantic to dip into it.
It even has tagging!!
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Also, as I know from my various blogging friends, who are mostly US-based and keen readers, Amazon sends them things, for free. And not just coffee-makers either. (As we just got with a wine delivery, not from Amazon.) Really cool things like MP3 players. Also, however, US Amazon sells things like used toilet paper, thanks to their semantic matching software, my blogging friend Debra Hamel often posts screenshots of this kind of thing on her blog “the deblog”.
I can see UK Amazon going the same way, recently they have added shoes and babies. In my case the shoes are not big enough and the babies are too late, but I am agog to see what is going to be next.
(I live on Amazon, our house is full of books and DVDs I will read and watch “one day”.)
Selling shoes online I can just about cope with, though they must get a lot of returns when they don’t fit, but I am disturbed that they sell babies online.
BTW there’s a good book on the Mechanical Turk – see the Popular Science review
I pressed the “baby tab” on the Amazon.co.uk and it took me here
Lots of baby products, but if there ARE any real babies they are way down on the list! :)
What do you advise I search for, for a real baby? Just curious…
…or was this a variation of the “soup powder”, “baby powder” joke, Maxine?
have you seen that Amazon UK is doing a phased release of a completely re-designed user interface? I still see the old design but some friends have been seeing the new design for a week or two.
There is information about it here