Ages and ages ago I wrote a rant about why I won't endorse Amazon . One of my readers and correspondents forwarded this on:
From: Carl Coryell-Martin (carl (at remoted to foil spam harvesters) quandsn.com)
To: feedback@amazon.com
Subject: Lowering the boom
Date sent: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 16:11:16
To whom it may concern:
It is with great regret that I must terminate my relationship with Amazon.com. I will no longer purchase products from you nor recommend your services to others.
You started with great promise: an online bookstore that provided an efficient shopping experience and a wealth of impartial meta-information about books. I loved the pointers to related books, I enjoyed the search services that would notify me when authors released new books and I enjoyed the feeling that I was supporting a breadth of authors and subverting the trend towards chain bookstores.
Unfortunately you have reneged on all of that initial promise.
1) You have violated customer trust by accepting money from publishers. I can no longer believe that you are primarily interested in serving my needs.
2) You have compromised the sanctity of customer feedback. The evidence* from JD Lasica and the comments on Monica's Story have cast doubt on your impartiality.
3) You are no longer interested in providing an efficient interface. Your latest site redesign has added useless advertisements for your auction software that interfere with my shopping.
I was an ardent supporter of Amazom and it is my hope that you will someday be a useful resource for buying books. Please decide who your customers are, and if you choose readers, please contact me and I will reconsider.
But if you want to serve advertisers, publishers or other websites, I am not interested and please don't waste my time.
Sincerly Yours,
Carl Coryell-Martin
*JD Lasica published an article in the Online Journalism Review titled "Not Good Enough, Amazon" http://ojr.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/departments/99_stories/watch_030999.htm
In this article he quoted several negative comments that he had seen on the Amazon Website on Monday March 8. When I looked at the Monica's Story page on Friday March 12 there were no negative comments for the site. I email coop-comments to ask about this discrepancy. The reply I received on the 25th of March suggested that there were some negative comments for the book at that time and that Ida would check with the catalog department. Unfortunately there are still no negative comments predating the 12th of March leading me to believe that Amazon deleted the earliest strongly negative comments.
Tuesday, March 30th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com